


Prodigal Son

by bookstorequeer



Series: The Velveteen Soldier and the Prodigal Son [3]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Character Study, Foster Care, Homophobia, Homosexuality, M/M, Male Homosexuality, Non-Graphic Violence, Secret Relationship, War, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-25
Updated: 2012-06-05
Packaged: 2017-11-06 00:58:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 27,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/412951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookstorequeer/pseuds/bookstorequeer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An exploration in Lipton. This is a look at the caretaker of Easy, from childhood in Huntington to old age in Montana, living with his partner Ronald C. Speirs. <i>Prodigal Son</i> is the life of Carwood Lipton, as it unfolds through the events of <i>The Velveteen Soldier</i>, looking at the same life from the point of view of the other man in it. Curious how Carwood coped with looking after an entire company of soldiers lead by an absentee CO? Or how he adjusted to life after the war? This is the story of how little First Lieutenant Carwood Lipton grew up, found love, and built a house of cards with Captain Ron Speirs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. PART I: In which the boy is a son and that son goes to war

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to Don, my real-life beta, and to [emocezi](http://emocezi.livejournal.com/) for her continued support and enthusiasm.
> 
> This posted in its entirety [at my livejournal](http://bookstorequeer.livejournal.com/106002.html).
> 
> There's a [fanmix](http://zellersee.livejournal.com/19962.html) for this effort, put together by the imminently talented [vertrauen](http://vertrauen.livejournal.com/).
> 
>  
> 
> (With regards to the "Character death" warning - men die in war and men grow old. That's the way that life goes and I cannot avoid that. Unfortunately, neither can these characters.)

\----------------------------------------  
PART I: In which the boy is a son and that son goes to war  
\----------------------------------------

Little Carwood Lipton wasn't a lonely boy. He had warm, brown eyes and an easy smile. He loved to help his Ma wash up and look after their boarders. He tried not to squabble with his brother but sometimes it was unavoidable. Carwood disliked arguing with family; he didn't like having things that could never be taken back because the person you'd said them to wasn't coming home. Things hadn't always been like this; Carwood could remember when his father was alive and things were different. He knows that dad taught him to tie his laces and catch a baseball. He could remember what it was like after his first after-school baseball win, hoisted on his father's strong shoulders.

But he could also still remember what it had been like after the car accident, when the doctors were trying to explain to him and to his little brother—who couldn't sit still because even a hospital can be exciting at age seven if you don't know any better—about spinal cord damage and what it means when they're broken. About sudden impacts and what it can mean to be at the point of impact when the entire vehicle is in pieces. The news that their mother would never walk again didn't seem so bad when they were then told that their father was dead. That night Carwood had dreamed of twisted metal and all the times that his father said, "You're the man of the house, son, until I come home," on the way out for some business trip or another. In the dream, Carwood nodded like he always did and told his father that he would do his best.

Carwood worried, sometimes, that his little brother Daniel wouldn't remember what it was like to have a man in their lives. When he was thirteen, he tried to teach a ten-year-old Danny to catch a baseball but there was less grass behind their row house than the one that they'd been born into in the country and the ball didn't sound right falling on rough-hewn dirt. It didn't take long for Danny to get frustrated with a glove that didn't fit because it had been Carwood's, because they didn't have any money for a new one. Carwood was playing with his dad's glove and he said that it was the dust from sitting in the attic that was making his eyes sting. His Ma hugged him when they came inside, dirty and disheartened, and she said that she was proud of how close they were. Carwood hadn't known how to reply when Donny had only shrugged and thrown Carwood's old glove onto the kitchen table like he couldn't be rid of it fast enough.

Missing his father bothered Carwood the most late at night, when he couldn't sleep because his mother's crying was like a monster crawling up the vent in the wall beside his bed. He'd tried talking to her about it once but she'd just told him that a person's thoughts were private at three o'clock in the morning unless they chose to share them with you. She didn't share and he never asked again. It wasn't worth watching her press the dishrag to her face to hide the tears, when he already knew that she missed her husband. He was the man of the house now and the man of the house did not make his mother cry.

It was one of the things they never talked about. Carwood knew that they all missed him but the only thing that made it worse was talking about it. Carwood had never seen talking about it fix anything. He had seen his Ma screaming into the phone when the electric company tried to cut off the electricity back before they had many boarders, and he had seen the doctors talking to his Ma about her legs. She tried to tell him that it was her body and not their words that had failed them but Carwood had already grown to appreciate silence. Sometimes, sitting alone in his room with the windowpane cool against his cheek, he could stop imagining what metal sounded like when it screamed and ruptured. His family learned to let him be when they saw him so quiet. No one liked to admit that they had seen each other cry.

So they went through their daily routine. Carwood shouldered as much responsibility as he could, stepping up to fill his father's shoes and help his Ma with bills and chores around the house. He took part-time jobs around the neighbourhood and at the grocer's to add to their finances and never told his Ma how much, sometimes, he wished that his father was there to put a big strong hand on his shoulder and say, "You're doing a fine job, son."

Things got a little easier as time progressed and they got used to their changed roles. They had big weekly Sunday dinners and talked about how the days had been and what sorts of chores there were coming up for the next week. It was a Sunday dinner when Daniel told them about his first girlfriend and another Sunday when their Ma told them she was going out for dinner with a nice man she had met in the doctor's office. Carwood had nodded, smiled, and eaten his broccoli like he always did. In high school, when little Carwood Lipton realized that he wasn't interested in girls the same way that the rest of the boys in his home room were, he didn't tell his family.

Carwood didn't watch the girls the way his best friend did, hungry for something neither of them quite understood yet. But he had seen what they did to boys who didn't like girls the way they were supposed to—the rumours had been all over that the Johnson boys had gotten off with a warning when they'd beaten one of _those_ to death. Carwood didn't quite understand how it was okay to kill such a man but his Ma had told him to stop asking about it and he did. He didn't like the sick feeling he got when he thought about it. That he didn't feel homicidal thinking about two men touching each other just made him feel further away from his classmates. It scared him and that's why when his best friend since they'd swapped lunches on the first day of second grade begged Carwood to go on a double date to the malt shop so that Susie Lovell could go, Carwood agreed even though he didn't want to.

He found Susie's best friend Marie cute and liked the way her pink nails seemed brighter against his tan when she held his hand. But he didn't try to steal a kiss the way Billy did from Susie and Marie seemed to like that about him. She smiled at him when he dropped her off on her front porch and cornered him into asking her to the dance on Friday. He did it because there was no reason not to and her freckles stood out when she blushed. Carwood decided then that there was no reason not for him to date girls, if they wanted to, because he couldn't be one of _those_. Men weren't supposed to be like that. So he wouldn't be.

His Ma fussed with his tie when Friday came around, even though it was already straight. He'd been tying his own tie for years and her hands were shaking, but he'd waited until he was back outside before he fixed it. She was smiling more than Carwood had seen her do since Mattew—the man she'd been seeing for a few months—ran off with some skirt from Boston, and he liked to see her happy.

The dance was nice, Marie smelled like strawberries and lipstick, and Carwood found himself on another date before he could say no. They went to the roller derby and out dancing when she said that she liked to. Carwood felt ungainly and clumsy with her tiny waist in his hands but she smiled at him and it helped him to forget that he couldn't seem to feel like Billy did with her pressed right up against him. He felt something with her warm body next to him and he told himself that it was enough.

He had listened to Billy brag about touching soft, pale skin on too many afternoons to count and Carwood did his best to have stories of his own. He had grown so used to lying to Billy, to his mother, to Marie and, sometimes, to himself that he barely noticed anymore. He graduated, got a job, and didn't let himself think about where his life with Marie was going. They had been dating all through high school and he gave her his graduation ring without thinking. She smiled and kissed him like she always did; he told Billy about it later, like he always did.

After that, his Ma kept telling him that she still had his grandmother's wedding ring safely stowed away and it took Carwood too long to work out why she was telling him. When he proposed to Marie, it was because there was no reason not to and he had grown used to the way she smiled at him. He loved her. He knew that he did. And he liked the way it made his Ma weep happy tears into a patterned handkerchief and not sad ones into a dish towel.

The wedding was a small, private ceremony in Marie's church. She was beautiful with her bright red curls and her smiling eyes. Carwood kissed his wife, held her all night like she wanted him to, and shipped out a year and a half later for Camp Toccoa and the war.

 

 

He had seen the article in TIME magazine while waiting to pick up his Ma from Dr. Glenn's office. It was her monthly appointment and although she always told him that he didn't have to wait, he always did. The waiting had become familiar and the receptionist, Janet, always smiled at him. He smiled back and fiddled with the wedding ring heavy on his left hand. It weighed him down sometimes, this commitment to Marie. He hated the fear that she would notice how it sat so strangely against his skin, like the lie of it was showing. But he loved her. He knew that he did.

The article that caught his eye was about a paratrooper infantry regiment of the US army. He read it through twice and asked Janet if he could tear it out. She told him to take the whole magazine and he read it that night before dinner until his fingerprints crinkled the pages.

"Carwood, what has gotten into you?" his Ma asked when his hands were shaking as he helped her into bed but little Carwood Lipton didn't have an answer. He wasn't sure how to explain to her that he, a newly married man in an essential-industry factory job with an ever-so-slight fear of heights, wanted to volunteer to be a paratrooper. He had avoided the draft and he could avoid the war but Carwood found that he didn't want to. He needed to prove to himself that the things he wanted, those dark, shameful things that he couldn't tell anyone about and that he did his best to ignore, wouldn't keep him from fighting.

To jump, you had to be the best and Carwood wanted to fight with the best. It didn't matter that his boss didn't want him to go. He was sure the old man thought he knew what was best, but Carwood sent a telegram to the manager of his old job at the grocer's and together they got an application in. He found that he didn't care about _this_ little white lie when the idea of leaving made his chest tight with feelings that he couldn't explain; he didn't know how to admit that tiny spark of relief, without giving away all the things that he was hiding.

His Ma said that she was proud of him. She had cried when he told her; she had looked at him with wet, red cheeks and asked if this was really what he wanted. When Carwood said yes, she said that he was a good man, just like his father. Marie's tears didn't seem to bother him as much as his mother's had. Those green eyes dimmed when he told her and when they made love that night, it was bittersweet like she expected to lose him to this war.

Telling Daniel was different because Carwood had already got his papers and he was headed to Georgia the day after next. Carwood had missed his brother but as the other man told him that they'd never let a "sissy" jump, he knew that he had lost his younger sibling earlier than that Sunday night dinner. He didn't tell his mother what happened because he knew that the lady was already aware that something had twisted irrevocably between the brothers. Their relationship had been broken for years, since Daniel had seen something Carwood wasn't quite old enough to know that he should have hidden; he had practiced kissing when he thought no one else was home and it had been the first and last time that Carwood ever dared to whisper someone's name while making moves on his pillow. Carwood had never told his mother why but, sometimes, he thought that maybe she already knew the shameful thing he had been caught doing. Now, she just smiled wetly and reminded him that she would always welcome him home.

Carwood knew that this wouldn't be easy; it was training to go to war and it was meant to strip you down to your essentials. When it was darkest and his doubts were loudest, before he had ever made the first step away from home, Carwood would lie beside a quietly sleeping Marie and worry just what would show through when he was laid bare. He had heard rumours of what the army did to men who _wanted_ like he did and dared to hide within their ranks. It hadn't been so difficult to ignore what he felt, sometimes, when he was here safe with Marie; and little Carwood Lipton told himself that he wouldn't have time to worry about it in the European theatre of war. Besides, he was married to Marie and Carwood figured that might be as happy as he was going to get. He was lucky to have a wife like Marie, who rarely asked for more than he could seem to give. If he could never give in to what he could never tell anyone, then Carwood figured that he could be happy with Marie. He loved her. He knew that he did. And most days he couldn't tell the difference between what he felt for her and what he was supposed to feel. He had never felt the passion that Billy still told him about sometimes, but Carwood thought that if he could just hold on to loving her, then he could do this.

She said that she was proud of him and they floated like ghosts through the last few weeks before the war set in. They nodded like they knew each other when they passed in the hallway of his mother's house but for Carwood, with excitement and anxiety squirming beneath his skin, there was a distance between them that he couldn't seem to breach.

The last day of his leave was spent packing up Marie's things to go back to her parents' place because she didn't want to stay in his mother's house alone. Carwood nodded, carried boxes as directed, and made sure to tuck her father's address into his breast pocket because he knew he would never remember it but didn't want to forget to write to this woman he had married. Carwood's last month had been a strange one with people pulling him close with pride and pushing him away in turn. He boarded the bus to Georgia with a suitcase full of civvies they wouldn't let him wear and momentos that he didn't know Sobel wouldn't let him keep.


	2. Chapter 2

Little Carwood Lipton arrived at Toccoa, Georgia, mostly fit from having grown up helping his mother into and out of her wheelchair, and a little balding. His uniform was tight the first time he put it on. The starched collar choked him, the snug epaulets across the shoulders bunched up. He felt ill-fitting and loose in all the places that he'd grown out of since puberty but there was something different about this uniform. It took him a day to realize that it was the tiny piece of fabric on his chest that was waiting for his jump wings.  
  
But none of that really mattered once he was standing at the kind of stiff attention he saw in the pictures, the kind that didn't feel any better fitting than the uniform, and Lieutenant Sobel was telling them that they weren't good enough to be a part of Easy Company. Before his head had stopped spinning from leaving his life behind, Carwood was part of a company of men doing a breathless climb up a mountain that he would come to know better than his Ma's own handwriting.  
  
Carwood had never told anyone, not even his Ma, that he had been a little afraid of heights ever since Joey Lawson—his best friend all through the third grade when Billy wasn't talking to him because he'd lost the boy's favourite marble—fell out of a tree and broke his leg. He had a nightmare before the first scheduled practice jump about falling and falling and never reaching the ground. He awoke gasping and grasping at the mattress like sheets and will alone could hold him to this earth. He didn't tell anyone but had a feeling that Lieutenant Winters already knew; that gaze was steady with an over the shoulder look but the Lieutenant didn't comment when Carwood's hands were unsteady as they checked the pack in front of him. This was nothing like the dummy plane ten feet up that they had jumped from yesterday and that had been bad enough. Carwood wasn't about to admit that his knees had locked in protest and it was only a hard shove that got little Carwood Lipton out of that plane.  
  
The sensation of falling was nothing like his dream, with a canopy over his head and his squad like jellyfish in the air around him. There was something peaceful about it, now, that he knew wouldn't be there during their jump over Europe. On D-Day there will be the whir of artillery and the whine of downed planes to replace the whistle of gravity in his ears. He'll have a white-knuckled grip on his gun that will do no good and a wide-eyed look on his face. Fear will be the final difference between his first and last jumps. The taste is the same inside the plane, metallic and sour but in the air it will be anticipation to replace the relief of a successful jump and a million fears to replace the miles of peaceful farmland as a stretching roadmap beneath his dangling boots.  
  
The entirety of Easy was giddy after their first real jump. Drinks were shared and Carwood found himself buzzed on adrenaline and cheap beer without really meaning to. The run in the morning, with Sobel barking at them for daring to indulge, would be painful but it was worth the feel of Muck's arm across his shoulders and some classless bar song tickling his throat as he tried to follow along with the words Toye was shouting in his ear. In that moment, Carwood Lipton, first son of Huntington, West Virginia, was a soldier and a brother in arms. In the morning he would groan at the sun for being too bright and hand a squinting Luz a cupful of water from the bathroom sink; then, Carwood would be more than just a brother but he didn't mind because there was something easy about taking care of these men. It reminded him of being back home and looking after his family. Easy's men were his brothers more closely than Daniel had been for a long time and that helped to settle him into a soldier's skin.  
  
There were men around Toccoa that he tried to limit his contact with but Carwood did his best not to hate anyone. That was more energy than he had, most days, but all of Easy seemed willing to dislike Sobel. It was difficult to trust that Captain to pull them through the coming days when they lost training exercises and orienteering activities under the man's direction. At night when he couldn't sleep, Carwood found himself nervous about their upcoming action in the European theatre. He had nightmares of a gun-shy Sobel leading them into a real ambush that would end with the men of Easy irrevocably lost. It haunted him. Carwood found himself watching the men play poker, write their letters home, and he would wonder which of them Sobel would kill first. That none had died so far was more a function of the men's brave spirit and guns never fired in training exercises than anything to do with Captain Sobel.  
  
Sometimes, it seemed to Carwood that Sobel was flailing as much as the rest of the men and he would feel almost sorry for the man who seemed so lost without a company to order around. But then there would be another degrading early morning parade or a Friday night run and it would become clear that instead of it bringing them together, Sobel was taking his embarrassed inexperience out on the men and that Carwood wouldn't stand for. It wasn't an easy decision to go against Easy's commander but he was sick of pulling latrine duty for offences no one was guilty of and of midnight runs up Curahee that left them all the more exhausted for the lack of any real rest.  
  
It wasn't that he had ever expected basic training to be easy—to be a part of the "goddamn airborne infantry," you had to be a tough sonofabitch—but Carwood hadn't expected to be unable to trust or respect his commanding officer. With the exception of Winters, who was always running beside them with an encouraging word or hand for all that the Lieutenant still seemed at a distance, Carwood found it difficult to think about trusting his life to any of them. He wanted Sobel to explain why it was necessary to be hated to be effective, to berate the men rather than to just order them. Carwood had found his own luck in training beside them and it felt good when they immediately followed the orders that he passed down, without question because he was the one suggesting it, because he was the one right there beside them when the directives were carried out.  
  
At night, Carwood polished his boots and played poker with Penkala, Muck, Martin, and Luz. He usually lost but it was worth Perconte's impressions of the generals whenever the other soldier wandered past. When it was quiet, he wrote letters home like they all did and ignored the teasing about his wife whenever they went out for drinks and he didn't look at the pretty girls. It was safer for the boys of Easy to think that he was completely devoted to his wife, rather than not interested at all. But he did love Marie. He knew that he did.  
  
He danced when someone asked him because the women were pretty and he couldn't afford for anyone to know; he thought that maybe the girls around Toccoa trusted him not to make any unwanted moves and he was grateful that they wanted to dance with him at all. Luz liked to tease him most often but even that soldier would stop when Carwood asked.  
  
And for that reason, Carwood was beside them all the way, through early morning taps and afternoons of tactics, orienteering, and Sobel yelling at them. Fridays they had their weekly 12-mile hikes in full pack and it was obviously wearing on the company. That's why, when he was approached by Grant and Talbert, he listened.  
  
He lost time the day the non-commissioned officers of Easy were set to meet; he couldn't concentrate on anything else. His stomach was trembling and it had been a week since he had been able to find the peace that he usually did at 0300 hours when everyone else was asleep. He tried to stay calm as they all gathered around the table. Ranney, Talbot, Harris, Guarnere, Grant, Martin, and even Randalman in complete agreement; Carwood knew that it was the idea of jumping without Winters that had pushed them over the edge. The court-martial that Sobel was pushing through was complete bullshit and it disturbed Carwood to see a man like Winters working away in the battalion mess when they needed him with them. Things had been easier when First Lieutenant Winters was there and it was the idea of jumping with only Sobel to guide them that had pushed them to meet in a dusty barn and discuss mutiny. To have Easy be free of Captain Sobel, little Carwood Lipton was fully ready to be lined up against a wall and shot but he made sure that these other brave men knew what they were letting themselves in for.  
  
"I will not follow that man into combat," Guarnere said and Carwood nodded, his own agreement like a firebrand in his gut.  
  
"Then let's do it."  
  
They all wrote in scratchy penmanship as Guarnere dictated for them.  
  
 _I hereby no longer wish to serve as a non-commissioned officer in Easy Company._  
  
Carwood thought that his own chicken-scratch was more difficult to read than usual but his intention was there and his name was clear. He gathered the papers with a "good luck" and strode out into the rain, their lives tucked into his jacket to keep the papers dry. He gave his best salute to hide unsteady hands to Sink's aide after handing over the letters. None of them were surprised when they were summoned a few hours later from the parade ground where Sobel had the entirety of Easy doing drills.  
  
He knew, academically, what the consequences of mutiny were and had made a specific point of reminding his fellow sergeants but there was something different about standing in front of General Sink and trying not to be sick as the man berated them. It wasn't undeserved but Carwood was still weak-kneed with gratitude not to be transferred or otherwise dismissed as Sink said, "It's nothing less than an act of mutiny while we prepare for the goddamn invasion of Europe. All of you NCOs have disgraced the 101st Airborne. You can consider yourself lucky that we are on the eve of the largest action in the history of warfare, which leaves me no choice but to spare your lives."  
  
Carwood and those other men of Easy were quiet as they tried not to stagger out of the building, blinking in the sunlight like a half-hour of getting chewed out could be comparable to a year in jail, but they couldn't seem to keep from smirking at each other when dawn-call a few days later found First Lieutenant Thomas Meehan calling them to attention, rather than Captain Herbert Sobel. Carwood tried not to count himself too lucky, knowing that life didn't take too kindly to over-confidence, and kept his head down as they were suited up for the drop in early June. So far there was a huge build up of men and material in England; they knew they were heading to battle in Europe, but they didn’t know when or where.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of the dialogue from this chapter is taken from the first episode. If it seems familiar, look to the Sobel-mutiny scenes and that'd be why.


	3. Chapter 3

Life in fatigues with a full pack and a reserve parachute wasn't easy. If there were ever days that men were tempted to turn in that extra $50 a week for being a paratrooper, Carwood imagined that these were them. Walking through the ranks of soldiers, Carwood wondered how much GI insurance could really matter in this moment, when all their futures stretched impossibly towards the far horizon, invincible because jumping out of a plane successfully in practice makes for brave men. None of them were thinking of artillery or enemy planes; even Carwood had difficulty turning his mind past the idea of polishing his jump wings—made dusty by Curahee and following Sobel around England—and showing up all those people who expressed their doubt in him back home. He wanted to prove to them that he was more than capable and he could see the self-same foolhardiness on faces smudged with dirt and ice cream. It was easy to pretend that war was a game of school boys because adrenaline and no outlet for it made children of them all.  
  
It wasn't until their training kicked in, in planes high above European soil that none of them had ever touched, that it became real and by then it was too late for Carwood to beg a mulligan and redo this decision to jump out of a perfectly good plane. By then, there was the shockwave of the aircraft before them exploding. There were shaking hands patting the pack ahead and fear-hoarse voices calling "Five okay, six okay..." until Carwood was at the door and then there was the disorientation of a night jump where the stars were bullets and the glow of the sun was your brothers in arms being killed just beyond the horizon.  
  
Landing was no better; the impact jarred his bones and flattened his lungs. Carwood spent precious moments patting damp soil in search of his rifle but all he found was mud. He was grateful that at least his knife had been strapped on, because every sound was a magnified threat in the shadows and he felt better with some sort of weapon still at hand. Little Carwood Lipton had never considered himself a bloodthirsty man but in the dark of D-Day without any of his brothers from Easy at his shoulder, he was ready to fight to slick blood and dirty hands, to death that he would never be able to clean out from beneath his fingernails, for his own survival.  
  
Still jarred from his impact with Normandy, Carwood nearly lashed out at the first of the soldiers that he ran into. He spared a heartbeat to be grateful that "flash-thunder" was the password for all American companies falling from the sky today, before getting them moving again. He felt a little more settled into this skin of a soldier by the time he stumbled upon First Lieutenant Dick Winters in the dark. There was water seeping through the crack in the side of his boot that had seemed like no big deal in Georgia, his hands were slick, and Carwood felt a little sick despite airsickness pills taken on the plane but none of that really mattered when people were shooting at them.  
  
  
  
The feeling of dazed shock that had settled into his bones lasted long enough to see Carwood bunking in with Grant and Martin once the adrenaline wore off. They'd jumped from a plane today, walked miles through enemy territory and taken out five machine gun nests before the sun had gone down, and he had a feeling that his body was just beginning to ache. Half of Easy was still scattered around Normandy and Carwood's rest was uneasy as he worried about them. This wasn't some training exercise that they could come back from. But as real as it seemed then, the war hadn't etched itself quite so irreparably into Carwood's flesh until Carentan.  
  
Carentan was D-Day+6 and little Carwood Lipton was tired. He hadn't had a good night's sleep since landing on European soil and the days of constant fighting were wearing him thin. The city itself was noisy and confusing and painful. Carwood could remember following Lieutenant Winters into the firefight and then his training kicked in and he had tried to ignore that men were dying around him. He didn't have many memories of it but he was told that a mortar shell had thrown him back a few feet into a wall. Shifty and then Doc Roe, the medic responsible for his syrettes of morphine, reassured him that nothing vitally important was missing and he would only be down a couple of days. It jarred him out of foolish bravery and as much as he tried to seem calm while the men of Easy could see him, when the shock had finally worn off, his body  _hurt_ .  
  
"You were lucky," Roe murmured, quiet in the sterile agony of the med tent as he stitched Carwood's thigh. The soldier in question tried not to flinch; Carwood resisted the urge to look at the needle and thick black thread, instead watching the concentration on the medic's face. He could hear the whimpered moans of soldiers not yet seen to and if he wasn't careful, he could hear the drip-drip of blood pooling on the floor. He didn't think he would ever get the smell of gun smoke and iodine out of his nose.  
  
"Just rest here the next couple days and we'll send you back to Easy."  
  
Carwood nodded faintly at the doctor and let the man help him to a cot in the open ward. The stitches itched and his body ached; as he fell asleep listening to the soldier three cots over struggling to breathe, Carwood wasn't sure that he felt too lucky.  
  
He awoke throughout the night when someone cried out or when wounded were brought in with shouts for a medic, more bandages, or a stretcher. In the morning, he was more tired than when he'd lain down, and his thigh was stiff. Roe told him that when he could get up and piss without wincing, then he could go back to the war.  
  
When he did get back to Easy, it was strange. Carwood felt heavier, wearier, as if the war had changed something deep within him and made it older and broken. When he had to tell the men that they were headed back to Europe, for good this time, he could see that self-same exhaustion in them. He retreated to his bunk soon after that, unable to watch previously for-the-moment-happy men scribbling wills on bar napkins in preparation for another jump, now that they knew what to expect from Europe.  
  
Everything was a little more difficult after little Carwood Lipton got hurt. The war was no longer something for stories and souvenirs; it was scars that would never fade away. It was watching Liebgott smoothing a dead soldier's blood off his hands whenever he thought no one was watching. Carwood made sure to watch Joe after that, pushing his own half-empty plate towards the other man when it was clear that Joe hadn't taken enough, and losing at cards because cigarettes were expensive and Carwood didn't smoke anyway, but Joe did.  
  
He wrote letters to his Ma whenever he had a moment but only half of them were ever sent and even then he did his best not to tell her about the war. She had seen enough violence the year he turned 10 that she'd be able to hear twisted, shrieking metal behind his description of a tank—their side's or the enemy's, he hadn't been sure—silhouetted against the sky. She would worry enough about him without knowing how scared he was at 0300 hours when even Liebgott's snores were quietest.  
  
The air outside the bar was always damp and a little cool. Carwood was grateful for the weight of his uniform because his sergeant’s chevrons didn't keep in the warmth when he felt so cold and tired inside. He saw a few soldiers in the distance but felt little urge to commiserate leaving England when he couldn't work out if he himself was scared, tired, or numb. He had never wanted to kill one man and now he had lost count. Carwood Lipton hated the war and he hated the way he still lied to his mother in his letters home, even though he was sure that she could see right through every word. He just couldn't help but try, by downplaying the mortar shrapnel that had nearly made him a eunuch and had scarred his face or by pretending that there wasn't dirt and blood that wasn't his own beneath his fingernails. He knew that at least his mother would still recognize him but he was, admittedly, a little sensitive about it. Losing his hair at entirely too young hadn't helped Carwood feel confident about his looks and although Luz and Buck teased him that skirts loved scars, he was unconvinced.  
  
He mentioned it to Marie in passing and her concerned three sentences about it were the most genuine feeling that he'd seen from her in quite a while. He'd almost not known what to write back, but when Talbert found a more recent picture of him than Marie was sure to have, he just included that. If it didn't end up on Marie's nightstand, then he thought it might have a place on his mother's dresser; outside of the scar, he liked to think that he filled out his dress uniform pretty well. He had practice in wearing it now and the lines of it fit his body better than they once had.  
  
Some of the men of Easy were still growing into theirs. The replacements were worst of all and Carwood often had the urge to straighten collars and posture just like his mother always had, but that mattered little when they were digging foxholes like graves for the company. They'd been fighting alongside these replacements-turned-brothers since their second jump and since Eindhoven, where women trying to survive however they could were brutalized in front of cheering crowd by their own townspeople. Carwood had laughed when Perconte was forcibly kissed but it had been less amusing to see women roughly stripped and shaved. He had stopped trying to see faces after that, even on the shorn women walking their roadsides.  
  
But eventually the replacements had grown into their uniforms and Easy had grown into its foxholes. And Carwood had grown to care about even these new men of Easy. Some days that he crawled out of his foxhole into the snow that refused to melt when he touched it because he wasn't warm enough, he didn't want to care. Little Carwood Lipton didn't want to have nightmares about the blood on his hands that came from the men he knew. He didn't want to start shaking when the bombs went off, because he didn't know who would be broken open this time. But it didn't matter what he thought he wanted, because they called him "Lip" and he helped dig foxholes and tried to keep track of where Dike was. Dinner was stewed K-rations and wishing they were nearly anywhere else, except maybe Toccoa under Sobel.  
  
Carwood tried to keep an eye on the men, making sure that Roe wasn't always alone when he seemed so worn down, that Muck and Malarkey weren't causing trouble or fleecing Luz and Perconte at poker. As he walked sentry between foxholes when he couldn't sleep, Carwood scuffed at bloody angels in the snow. The ground still looked pink when dawn broke but it was easier to ignore that than a lost mitt or the depression of a best friend lying in the snow. Unfortunately, there wasn't much he could do for those beyond the help of medics. That's why Easy—Carwood included—tended to be grateful when the snow did fall. It made staying warm difficult and God help you if you had to actually fire on the enemy when there was a storm in the air, but it did cover up the things that none of them could stand to see anymore.  
  
Sometimes Carwood just had to close his eyes and pretend that he was back home, where the war had never touched him, where he had never been ordered to watch his friends get killed or to kill someone else's friend on the other side of the war. Carwood knew that he would never forget—Hoobler with his luger or Toye and Guarnere in pieces. He'd never see fireworks the same way after that nightmare where mortars broke the world apart; Carwood had thought, for a split instant of remembering before the war, that the lights and the sound were nothing to be afraid of, nothing to duck and cover from. Toye and Guarnere had showed him differently. And Buck with his silence and stillness showed them what a man looked like at the end of his endurance.  
  
A second night of heavy shelling lost them Muck and Penkala; Carwood found himself with Luz in his foxhole, both of them staring at the unexploded shell. It seemed like the perfect time to take up smoking; Luz had looked at him strangely but the smoke never seemed to taste so sweet as that first drag after not being killed. He kept up the habit afterwards, unable to resist searching for that elusive rush first thing. It wasn't that he was as twitchy as the rest of them when he couldn't lay hands on a pack of Lucky Strikes but that brief second of a match's flame or Perconte's lighter was a heartbeat of warmth in a winter that was freezing them all solid. Carwood couldn't bring himself to give that up. It wasn't healthy—growing up in doctor's offices and waiting rooms had taught him that—and some mornings his chest was tighter than he'd like and he couldn't seem to stop coughing, but then Luz would smile and hand over his own cig for a drag and Carwood would feel that same rush of friendship and I-am-so-glad-that-we're-not-dead that he had nights ago in a foxhole too shallow to be a grave.  
  
  
But it was more difficult to watch out for Easy, little Carwood Lipton found, when they were digging their own tombs in the middle of the Bois Jacques because Uncle Sam didn't want the krauts to get it, and because they had their orders but never the logic of their action. He tried to connect with Lieutenant Dike, to understand Easy's newest CO, but there was something missing behind the man's eyes that Carwood didn't have the time or the energy to find. Every day in that place he found himself bled a little drier, run down with the weight of holding Easy above water. He just couldn't spare the attention to corral Dike into being the commander that he should have been when Carwood had only gotten a few hours of sleep the night before because the enemy had made a raid on the line and Easy was the chosen defense. It didn't help that he hadn't felt like himself since they'd first set up camp in this place; Carwood did his best not to let on that one minute he was freezing and another flushed with sweat. It was too easy to hide when the majority of the company had more important things to keep in mind, like which end of the gun to point at the advancing German soldiers. Things were hard and Carwood was tired. The constant firelight overhead was a reminder that no matter how beautiful the lights, they all contained fire. He was sick of watching Easy get burned.  
  
Life with Norman Dike was difficult for Carwood Lipton. He missed having Captain Winters on his side; it had been immediately comforting to find the man in the confusion of D-Day, handing over responsibility for everything but his knife and trusting Winters to see him through. But with Dike at the reigns, Easy was a wild horse, nervous and easily spooked to panic. The men were feeling every echo of gunfire through the woods and when they most needed a strong commander, they got Foxhole Norman. Dike seemed nice enough, from what Carwood could tell, but the man was never around. He seemed entirely too comfortable handing over the decisions and the responsibilities of Easy to her Sergeants; he was a placeholder CO but not the real thing and it was easy for Carwood to see the fault lines in the men just waiting to quake. He struggled to hold them together with inside jokes and letting them tease him over Marie long past what he normally allowed, because self-dug foxholes should not be graves for men who didn't need to die. He knew that Buck and the other platoon leaders felt similarly.  
  
He was sick of their rations warmed in a stolen bucket and solitaire played in the snow but it was the silence at night that ate at him. There were no fires when they were just targets in the dark; there was no talking above a "flash-thunder" whisper when something cracked underfoot on the way back from the third pine on the left that doubled as a latrine. There was little to remind them of why they were in the snow with no winter gear, no ammunition, and no orders. It was a difficult time for Easy and Foxhole Norman wasn't making anything better.  
  
Still, although Carwood wasn't Dike's biggest fan, he couldn't let the men disparage the Lieutenant. It wasn't doing anything but undermining the little of the men's confidence that Dike still had. Carwood told Luz to knock off the impressions and tried to open up to their CO when asked what waited for him back home. He told Dike about his Ma and would have mentioned Marie, even if second, if he hadn't looked up and seen that he was alone. It had summed up a lot of what he felt with Dike in charge of Easy; it was difficult to be confident in a leader who was never there.  
  
Carwood found himself telling Captain Winters about the men who didn't need to die and dreaming about an army run by absentee generals. He tried not to think about it, just to guide Easy with a heavier hand than he had before but it was harder with a woods full of shadows and their CO full of yellow. Carwood surprised himself, and possibly also Winters, by going back to to the battalion commander the night before their assault on Foy.  
  
"I have every confidence in the men, sir."  
  
And he did. Luz would straighten up when the moment called for it and Shifty was the best shot in the entire 506th. Carwood could easily trust any of the men to watch his back.  
  
"But on the other hand, I have no confidence in our CO, sir."  
  
He'd thought, hoped that there would be something that Winters could do but Carwood could see the same resignation in Dick's eyes as in Buck's or Malarkey's.  
  
"Lt. Dike is an empty uniform, Captain."  
  
The exhausted soldier tried to hide his disappointment; he hadn't felt this powerless since facing down General Sink in Georgia with the knowledge that it would be his own fault if he were transferred from Easy and no guarantee that it would make any difference at all about Sobel. He nodded to Captain Winters and left with the man's eyes on his back; Carwood didn't find Winters' obviously tied hands as comforting as a new CO would have been. He fell into a sleep made uneasy by the knowledge that Easy was well and truly stuck with Lieutenant Norman Dike.  
  
  
Foy was a disaster, in Carwood's mind. Their CO had lead them into enemy territory and when the company was pinned down, Norman Dike had checked out. Carwood would have been speechless if he hadn't been so worried about Easy. He tried yelling and, as that failed to get any sort of reaction from the man, he was thinking of doing what he could to rally the men and salvage this clusterfuck when he saw a man he only knew through rumour and legend sprinting the field towards them. Carwood watched, dry-mouthed and captivated, as Captain Speirs got right into Dike's blank face and yelled, "I'm taking over," like it was the easiest thing to lead a company to war. Easy had been waiting months in the Bois Jacques to hear someone say those words.  
  
The action on Foy was a blur after that. What Carwood would remember was mostly an ache in his lungs as he followed his new CO's orders to take second platoon on in; blood from the shrapnel that added to the scars on his face; being grateful that Shifty was on their side after the Staff Sergeant took out a sniper no one else could; and stormy hazel eyes that he had never seen up close before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, some dialogue is taken from the show itself, episode seven: "Breaking Point."


	4. Chapter 4

It wasn't until later, with Easy high on success and having a commander who wasn't Dike—for all that Speirs was an unknown entity himself—that little Carwood Lipton found himself standing across from Lieutenant Ronald C. Speirs. The church at Rachamps was lit by candles and the choir sounded beautiful. Carwood thought that he would always remember them for this little moment of peaceful beauty in the middle of a war. The grace of their singing gave Carwood the courage to put together a list of those men who had been lost. Easy's current roster was distressingly slim. They'd gone into the forest with 121 men, including 24 replacements, and they were leaving Foy, Noville, and Rachamps, with 63. Carwood ached for brothers gone but he knew that the men were grateful to have Speirs on their side and he surprised himself by saying so.  
  
"They're just glad to have you as our CO," he said, his stomach twisting strangely when Captain Speirs smiled at him. Carwood smiled back and hoped that his voice was steady. "They're happy to have a good leader again."  
  
"From what I've heard, they've always had one," Speirs replied and Carwood looked away as exhaustion and grief over men lost washed through him. All he could think about was how warm the Captain sounded and how he didn't deserve the confidence, for the men that he'd let down.  
  
He had shaken his head rather than reply with a voice he couldn't trust, and the captain's answering smile had him fighting a flush. Being told that he was getting a battlefield commission to Lieutenant barely even registered when his new CO flashed him a pleased grin. Carwood was almost grateful when Speirs left and he could blame exhaustion and the lingering cough that he just couldn't shake, for how much his body was trembling as he sat again. He barely even protested when Luz tried to tease him, later, about being star-struck by Easy's new CO. Let them think that; Carwood knew it was safer than what they would whisper if they knew what he dreamed of, sometimes, that involved a captain's jacket in the dust on the floor beside his cot and another pair of boots tossed next to his own. Those surprisingly soft hazel eyes were something he would remember as he was trying to fall asleep that night and long after, although he wouldn't let himself think about why.  
  
It surprised Carwood at the oddest of times. He would be carrying a plate to the table at mess and he would get the strangest urge to have a stack of pancakes and non-instant coffee someday at a kitchen table, across from Ron Speirs. Or in the midst of writing a letter to Marie, little Carwood Lipton would wonder if Speirs would get along with his Ma, if he could fit that man into his life. At first he chalked it up to the fever under his skin, but the domestic thoughts lasted longer than hot and cold flashes.   
  
Eventually he learned to ignore the thoughts and feelings that he had no right to entertain about such a good man and honourable soldier. It was easier to ignore when his body was aching. He had been feeling the tightness in his chest for a few days and he'd been panting for breath as they ran through Foy but chalked it up to adrenaline because he didn't have time to be sick. He still didn't but he gave in to painful coughs when the dust settled and he had a moment to try and breathe and find it difficult in Hagenau. He'd picked up smoking in a foxhole, but probably not the same one that he'd picked up pneumonia from. It wasn't ever anything that he had intended to keep up but he found himself standing next to a dark-eyed Speirs one morning, still shaky from coughing for the past two weeks straight and a little wary of Speirs because he had collapsed on the man not a week after first putting a face to the rumours. Carwood really shouldn't be smoking at all, with weak, tender-pink lungs but the way his CO's shoulders relaxed a little when Carwood didn't immediately demand something from the run-ragged CO or flee that potentially dangerous presence, had him hooked more strongly than unfiltered nicotine. Carwood found himself not waking until he had seen those whiskered lines deepened by a restless night. After the first, "Good morning, Lipton," it was easier to fill the silence with whatever he knew about Easy that might benefit the Captain to know. Carwood liked the way his voice made Speirs soften from parade rest to something more like sleepy-among-friends. He liked the way it felt when Speirs smiled at him around a cig like the expression was okay from a hard-nosed CO if it was hidden behind a vice. Some mornings there was nothing to say in the half-light but the silence was comfortable between them. Carwood hoped that it would always be like that, so familiar that it wasn't anything like holding his breath the way it was with others. It felt like he didn't have anything to hide from Speirs.  
  
Although Speirs had come to Easy under gunfire, he had the blessing of Major Winters. The entire company had watched in awe as this man—made more of rumour than muscle and blood—had run through the village and back without missing a stride. Carwood had never seen anything like it and for a moment he had forgotten that he was cold, sore, scared, bleeding, and probably sick. All that there had been was Captain Speirs running back with firefights like firelight behind him. With Speirs at the helm, Easy was fine and Carwood could let go of a little of the weight that he'd carried so far. It hadn't even really mattered that they hadn't been able to rest right after Foy like they'd all thought they would. Instead they'd found themselves figuring out a new CO while fighting in Noville and Rachamps without any real chance to lick their wounds from Foy and the Bois Jacques. The night that found them in the church at Rachamps was the first night Carwood had slept inside in a month and if his body hadn't sandbagged him the moment he'd lain down, he was sure that he would have taken a moment to luxuriate in the safety of a roof over his head, like Luz later told him that the men had. Carwood had just smiled and coughed into his sleeve with George wasn't looking.  
  
He couldn't help but like Speirs more than Dike. Speirs was a scary sonofabitch but he was better than Easy being on their own with only an absentee CO to guide them. Carwood did his best to swallow down his own embarrassing hero-worship and the blushes that even Bastogne's ground-in dirt couldn't hide.  There were still times when he was scared, when little Carwood Lipton wished that he were anywhere but in Europe. But at other times, when he was playing poker with Speirs, Winters, Walsh, and sometimes Nixon, or laughing over Luz with Perconte and Guarnere, that it wasn't so bad. It surprised him, but having Speirs in his life seemed to make it easier.  
  
  
But it wasn't long after Captain Speirs took over Easy that Carwood noticed how haggard their commanding officer looked. It was nothing that would affect the command but it bothered him that even this seemingly cold, rumour-riddled man might not have had a taste of the camaraderie that Carwood felt set Easy apart from the likes of Dog and Fox. Taking advantage of his own foxhole-borne addiction, Carwood started taking his first smoke of the day beside the captain he was serving under.  
  
"You know, sir," he ventured, amazed at his own brave stupidity after a third morning of Speirs watching Carwood say good morning without a word of greeting from his own lips. It was unnerving and at the same time he didn't seem to mind it from Speirs like he would from anyone else.  
  
"They'd say good morning if they didn't think you'd bite their heads off."  
  
He couldn't stop a grin when that eyebrow lifted at him and the other man frowned. For a split instant, this wasn't his CO Captain Speirs, this was his new friend Ron, and that man was safe for Carwood to tease.  
  
"I'm just saying that you have a certain  _reputation_ , Captain, and it's a damn shame, sir. I'm sure you have a wicked sense of humour beneath those bars."  
  
The doubt that followed when thoughtful hazel eyes seemed to follow him all day and the fear that somehow he'd given away the few secrets he had left to keep, was all worth it when he got a "Good morning, Lipton," that grew into quiet talks in the early dawn when everything was a little too real because they had just dreamed it all. Little Carwood Lipton found himself struggling not to blush whenever their fingers brushed in sharing matches or a cigarette.  
  
Perconte told him not to share Lucky Strikes with their CO because rumour said that the man wouldn't hesitate even to kill his own but the truth behind that rumour, whispered into the dark between them one night when the war seemed like it would never end, said something different. The truth told Carwood something about the nature of the man responsible for an entire company of men, who took that responsibility more seriously than anyone realised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some dialogue is from episode 7: "The Breaking Point" and some of it is from "The Velveteen Soldier" (the companion piece to this fic).


	5. Chapter 5

Carwood mailed letters home whenever he got the chance. Sometimes he got a response after two or three had gone out about what he’d seen or boys they’d lost but writing felt comfortable and he didn't mind the wait. He did worry about his Ma, though. Her letters were always cheerful, full of the "You know Sally/Hank/John, I introduced you at the grocer's/hardware store/post office" anecdotes about people he couldn't remember that he was used to. He never knew any of these people and sometimes he halfway wondered if she was making them up but it was great to see her familiar handwriting on the torn envelope and he always pretended that he did know them so that he could imagine her in the grocer's catching up with his middle school teacher, when the nights were darkest and coldest. But sometimes, Carwood worried if she was getting on okay, if maybe she was sick when her letters were late and she didn't want to give herself away with weak or shaky handwriting. But he was grateful when she did write, because those letters were a distraction when he needed it and his replies reassured his mother that he was doing all right. Carwood knew that his chicken-scratch was practically illegible so it would be unlikely that anyone could fool his mother by writing for him—it comforted them both.   
  
That's why it was such a surprise to realise that he had never seen Speirs with a scrap of war-smeared, home-touched paper. He had never seen part of a stamp in some random pocket and he had never seen Ron willingly step into the post office without an armful of stolen silver. There were packages of silver and other shiny things sent to an address always hidden but there was never a hand outstretched to get anything back.   
  
Carwood wanted to find someone to write to so that Ron would received one letter back in the midst of war that was addressed to more than a soldier's serial number. But there were no addresses to be squirrelled out of tight lips and no secret friends back home to write in stealth. The best Carwood could do was share those letters that he got himself. He didn't mention the gratitude in those shoulders when the news was good, when the words from home made them both laugh or smile in a moment's peace.   
  
Although he wasn't about to admit it, it was disorienting for Carwood to read aloud a letter from his wife when the man standing at his shoulder could make him feel more with a smile than she could with a night together. He never mentioned it and prayed that Ron couldn't read the fidgeting of his fingers on the crinkled edges of the paper or his body in its tense slouch against whatever he was resting on to read.   
  
At first Marie's letters had been full of "I love you"s and "I miss you"s and Carwood always responded with the same because it was easy to miss what he'd grown used to and he loved her. He knew that he did, even if it wasn't the way that he was supposed to if you were to get married. His brother had never quite believed him when Carwood tried to explain how much he cared for Marie. Ron had just nodded without saying a word the one time Carwood had mentioned her as anything other than a letter.   
  
After basic training, before that first jump in Europe but close enough to taste it, he had noticed that his wife's letters were more about Rotary Club meetings than any sort of significant inquiry after his own well-being or any mention of spousal adoration. His own letters were more filled with anecdotes about Luz and Perconte then, and now Speirs, more than the truth of the war, anyway, so it took him some time to notice.   
  
Little Carwood Lipton was in Europe with Captain Speirs, Ron, at the head of Easy before he got the letter that he probably should have expected. It surprised him how much it hurt that Marie had found someone else, someone who could do more than just pretend to love her the way a husband should love a wife. Carwood loved her. He did. It just wasn't enough with the war between them to show the truth in the middle of the night when he almost didn't wish that he was home with her.   
  
Ron found him on the roof of their current safe house watching the clouds and pretending that they were stars. They stood side-by-side, guns in hand and silent, until the day lightened and someone came looking for the both of them. Carwood was grateful it took as long as it did for the war to call on them.   
  
When Carwood didn't say anything to Easy about a divorce done in absentia, he knew that he could trust Ron to be silent on the subject. Carwood wasn't ready to have the men dissecting the reasons behind this dissolution, even if he knew what the reasons really were. The real reason had less to do with being away at war and more to do with how he found himself watching Ron sometimes. It wasn't like what he felt when he looked at Marie. It wasn't something that he could help but it was something that he knew to hide. He had learned that lesson when his brother caught him midway through high school practicing kissing while whispering the name of the boy who had caught his eye.   
  
Carwood Lipton had known that it wasn't something that could ever come true but in a fit full of hormones, he had found himself kissing his pillow with Jim's name on his lips. Jimmy was Carwood's tutor in math two afternoons a week after school. He had dark hair and pale skin that Carwood wanted to touch. His brother took one look at him, snarled disgusting things Carwood was sure he would never forget, and burnt the pillowcase in the fire pit in the backyard. Carwood didn't say a word when he got the blame for lost linen. His brother didn't talk to him for a whole month and even then it wasn't the easy camaraderie of horsing around when loading the laundry and hauling the groceries. Daniel stopped sharing comics bought with grass-cutting earnings and Carwood didn't ask why.   
  
He had a feeling that his Ma knew. He didn't know why he thought so or how she would know but neither of them said a word when he had been at home and a letter in the war was even less the place for it. She cried at his wedding and at the time Carwood had thought that they were happy tears. Three years and one divorce later, he wasn't so sure but he wasn't going to ask. He didn't want to upset any sort of truth-sharing balance between them. Just like he was desperate not to give himself away to Ron.   
  
  
He called Ron "Sparky" sometimes, to knock the other man out of the thoughts in his head and got "Car," albeit rarely, in response. Eventually he would learn that it sounded infinitely better whispered without a war outside the door waiting for them.   
  
He started after Speirs told him about the one childhood nickname that didn't bring back memories of sarcasm and switches. Carwood liked the way that it always made Ron stop and stare at him. No one else had the balls to use it; he liked knowing that Ron Speirs was the one person in Europe that he didn't have to keep secrets from.   
  
Carwood was sure that after all these months together, he shouldn't still get nervous flushes and happy butterflies when Speirs asked for his help with the men or when he was invited to a poker game or for a nighttime walk to check the sentries, but Carwood's body didn't understand that. He couldn't stop himself from reaching out, sometimes, when he was still tired from a sleepless night or when even a "Sparky" or two wasn't shoving Ron out of the wrong headspace. It had terrified him, the first time, waiting breathless and stiff for Ron's reaction to an uninvited breach of personal space but a heartbeat later the arm beneath his palm had unclenched and Carwood had exhaled lowly in relief.   
  
He hadn't been able to read the look that Speirs had given him when he'd done it again without thinking, heartsick from some idiotic act in the war, but it hadn't taken little Carwood Lipton too long to grow used to Captain Ron Speirs watching him. At first it was disconcerting, something that startled him out of the war they were fighting; it was a hard gaze that he didn't know how to interpret. He had never really listened to the rumours but with Perconte in his ear, he began to wonder if he should stop accepting proffered cigarettes first thing in the morning.   
  
When he jokingly brought it up, something in that face shut down. Before his eyes, Carwood could see the other man closing off without moving a muscle.   
  
"Speirs? I - "   
  
"If that's everything, Lieutenant?"   
  
Carwood Lipton had never heard Speirs sound so cold to him and he found that he didn't like it. Like the little boy prone to making friends with everyone his mother told him not to, Carwood didn't bother to stop himself from reaching out, although he didn't dare let his hand linger once he'd recaptured the Captain's attention.   
  
"Ron, I'm sorry."   
  
The captain stilled beneath his touch and Carwood felt his heart clench with that familiar fear, sure that the other man could read the thoughts within him that he was never supposed to show.   
  
"I didn't - I mean, I know you won't..."   
  
Carwood swallowed and his throat clicked. He couldn't seem to find the words to soften that regard again.   
  
"Sometimes I hate my damned reputation," Speirs surprised them both by saying. His voice was hoarse in a way that made Carwood ache for the lonely boy that he kept catching glimpses of beneath the captain's bars. Carwood nudged a startled shoulder with his own and he knew that he had been forgiven when Ron smiled and very nearly laughed as Carwood reassured him that at least Easy would never mutiny against him like they had Sobel; there could be benefits to being a tough, scary sonofabitch.   
  
  
But Carwood couldn't help the way that he watched Speirs sometimes. Whether it was moving against the Germans, or just sifting through paperwork with a low growl, there was something intense about Ronald Speirs.   
  
Carwood's heart was in his throat when Ron accepted his haphazard invitation to enjoy a sweet, stolen can of peaches. He hadn't meant anything by it, knew how dangerous it was to be so close to this man, especially alone, but he couldn't bring himself to take it back when Ron gave him that half-hidden, shy smile that he almost never got to see.   
  
It was quiet in Ron's bunk with everyone at mess. The light on the broken-legged end table flickered fitfully and Carwood's hands were shaking ever so slightly as he opened the dented can. The first bite was a burst of sweetness on his tongue and juice dripping down his chin. Carwood laughed when Ron swallowed noisily and made a show of wiping off a stubbled cheek. Carwood grinned and found himself drifting closer when his best friend smiled back. Without thinking, he was close enough to taste the peaches on Ron's mouth.   
  
Carwood pulled away when he realised that he was kissing his captain. Heart stuttering and chewing on his own stomach, little Carwood Lipton couldn't look away from those dark eyes staring at him. He swallowed, ready to bolt and deny the whole thing, when a warm, sweaty, calloused hand settled over his. He nearly moaned in shock when there was a mouth against his and the whisper of a smile against his skin. Carwood didn't bother trying to hide a grin when one kiss from Ron did more to make his stomach jump than a night in bed with his wife. He knew it was wrong and that it would get them killed if anyone found out but he couldn't stand the thought of never again tasting peaches made sweeter by Ron Speirs.   
  
"Ron, I..."   
  
He didn't know what he had been about to say but he was grateful when he got another kiss rather than a conversation.   
  
Little Carwood Lipton had always liked the taste of peaches. They were best fresh or in his Ma's cobbler on special occasions but he found that he had a special place in his heart for the taste of them on the lips of Captain Ron Speirs.   
  
The first time, it surprised him. The strength of the feelings he had been determinedly ignoring had surprised him, and the taste of Ron's lips would always surprised him, at first. He'd forget that he was familiar with the sensation, with the feel of that body pressed against him.   
  
When his head cleared from the taste of peaches on his tongue, Carwood looked at the satisfied expression on his best friend's face and was grateful that things weren't strained between them like they could have been. He tried not to let it show but he knew that he felt things for Ron beyond camradarie. He also knew that if he were found out, he would disappear to ugly rumours overnight and Ron would be without even Carwood to lean on. He couldn't do that to his friend but when Ron smiled at him and kissed him again, Carwood was helpless to pull away.


	6. Chapter 6

They could never seem to find enough quiet moments together over the course of the war to satisfy the need that Carwood had to feel Ron's body against him, to taste the skin beneath those rumours. He was obsessed with watching Ron fall apart in his arms and it didn't matter that there was a war outside the door. He didn't want it to matter.  
  
Carwood was surprised at his own selfishness but he could easily read the same territoriality in Speirs' hand on his arm to get his attention when Luz was standing too close or the faint ache of bite-bruises beneath his uniform if he'd come too close to injury.  
  
There weren't many words between them, not the kind that most people who loved each other seemed to find necessary. Ron had no difficulty barking orders and Carwood no trouble relaying them, but there were times when there was only silence between them. Carwood found it peaceful after the cacophony of the war outside his head. There was something bolstering about spending an hour in Ron's presence, anticipating a needed pen or the want of a coffee in silence.  
  
It was something to hold on to nights spent on his own. He could replay the touch of fingers against the back of his neck as Ron passed behind him, when he was wondering what they were doing playing with fire. Carwood could remember the smell of Ron and he wouldn't have to doubt that the other man cared because no one else could get so close. It was too easy to see friendships made and lost in war; Carwood had seen men closer than friends who were terrified that they would lose everything if the relationship forged in a foxhole was ever held up the light.  
  
He knew that he and Ron were stronger than rumours but he couldn't help but be worried by what came after the war, when soldiers returned to lives and families interrupted. The reverent way that Ron always touched him—as if he were something to be cherished or to be lost—helped to remind Carwood that of all the men he could trust, Ronald Speirs was at the top of any list. If Ron didn't have a way with words, then he definitely had a way with his body and Carwood had never had trouble translating.  
  
"I love you."  
  
It was said in the aftermath of the worst day of the war. They'd woken that morning, unsuspecting. The war was essentially over and there shouldn't have been any more surprises, nothing to warrant Perconte running into their occupied village out of breath with horror in his eyes.  
  
That was the day that Little Carwood Lipton truly understood why he was fighting this war. There was reason enough for a lifetime spent fighting the look of fearful hope in bloodshot eyes as he yelled for food, water, and blankets, and the crack of Joe Liebgott's voice as those chicken-wire fences shut again with a louder clang than Alcatraz.  
  
He lost track of Ron as the day progressed, organizing blankets and whatever food they could scrounge from rations carried and food plundered from the village. He saw Ron's hand in the looting and felt, if not like smiling, then a little less like crying. But then Winters was telling them what the General's doctor was saying about not feeding hungry men, and Carwood stopped trying to understand any of it. He would settle for being able to grab Ron and run. He barked orders at the second platoon and when that didn't work, pushed back the skeletons in prison garb himself. He just wanted this day to be over so that he could start trying to forget the way brittle bones felt beneath his hands and how desperate confusion sounded when it echoed from a thousand mouths.  
  
He found Ron when things had settled more firmly into shock, leaning against the fence and staring at nothing. He knew better than to touch the other man without Ron's attention but some part of Carwood didn't care about the reaction he knew he would get. The pain from a wayward fist felt better than the numbness that he had been carrying all day. But finding something other than dumb horror wasn't worth the remorse in Ron's eyes as the other man helped him to his feet. Carwood wanted nothing more than to lean into the hands brushing him off but had to content himself with calling Ron "Sparky" until there was something other that sorrow between them.  
  
Carwood had trouble sleeping that night and Ron was no better. He winced at painful dry heaves and handed over the bottle of gin that Captain Nixon had given him after one look at a pale, unseeing Speirs. He was grateful that this night neither of them cared about the dangers of lying together; he didn't think that he could have withstood sleeping alone. His dreams were bad enough but there was comfort to be had in a body against his that wasn't all skin and bones like his nightmares. It helped a little to be able to scream his heartache into someone else's bones.  
  
The next morning was an ugly thing for Easy. The horror of the day before had smeared sleeplessness across every face and Carwood wished that they didn't have to go back, didn't have to face those battered souls. But someone had to oversee the villagers digging a mass grave for those lost, and Carwood wasn't about to let Ron do it alone. As it was, it took calling the man "Sparky" until the moniker was engraved into his tongue before Carwood saw anything on that face other than a man willing himself not to vomit. The horrible feeling in his gut and the way he knew he'd never get the smell out of his fatigues was worth it when Ron gave him that grateful look. Carwood loved the warmth in that look.  
  
  
  
It was supposed to be safe for them. The war was supposed to be over and no one else was supposed to get hurt or killed. Shifty Powers wasn't supposed to spend months in convalescence over an accident on his way _home_. And Carwood wasn't supposed to have to stand idly by as Ron, acting as Captain Speirs, the commander of Easy and not the man that he had come to know, tried desperately not to lose one more soldier.  
  
Later, when the night was quiet and about laid to rest, Carwood found Ron washing blood off hands that were already clean. He leant his cheek against a strong, warm shoulder and breathed lowly into the silence.  
  
"He's going to live."  
  
Ron slumped like a broken puppet without a master and shook his head.  
  
"I terrified a kraut doctor and almost shot an American soldier, Lip."  
  
"I know, Sparky." Carwood slid an arm around that familiar waist and took a chance in hugging that body to him. He shut off the water when Ron turned into him. They stood like that until Carwood knew their chance had been taken, that the risk had gone on too long, enjoying the knowledge that at least one soldier injured wouldn't be dying tonight, not with Speirs as champion of Easy.  
  
  
"Ron?"  
  
Their current barracks were quiet and Carwood could hear Welsh snoring in the room next to theirs. He'd sacked out early and no one really seemed surprised if Ron took the quiet of his non-snoring room rather than bunking with Harry. He heard a faint squeak of the cot across from his bed and knew that Ron was listening. He took a moment to sort through the things that he didn't want to say, to find the things that he did.  
  
"I don't want to go back to Huntington."  
  
His home town was like a uniform outgrown; he'd never fit and trying wouldn't do anyone any good. Carwood didn't know where he wanted to live but not there. If Ron gave him the go-ahead, he would follow the other man across the country if he had to.  
  
"Montana?"  
  
He smiled into the darkness of 0300 hours and nodded to himself.  
  
"Montana sounds nice."  
  
  
Later, another night, tired from nothing but endless drills and hours of listening to Ron grind down his molars not yelling at stupid generals deciding the fate of every man in Easy, Carwood couldn't sleep.  
  
"Ron?"  
  
He got a quiet grunt this time to accompany the squeak of the cot. He wished that they could lie together but that wasn't advisable in a house with no locks on the doors. He settled for hearing that familiar voice in the dark when he couldn't find his dreams.  
  
"I don't want to work in another factory."  
  
Carwood hadn't realised that it was true until he'd said it but he couldn't seem to lie to himself at 0300 hours and he could never lie to Ron.  
  
"Go back to school?"  
  
"But for what?"  
  
"For whatever, Lip."  
  
Carwood laughed and was sure that he could feel Ron's smile in the dark. It was just like the other man to support him, even in some useless endeavour, if that's what he wanted to do. He told himself that he wouldn't waste that faith, that he wouldn't take this man for granted.  
  
  
  
He didn't know that Dick was setting it up, that he would be getting a transfer away from everything that reminded him of why he was fighting this war. Everyone said that it was over, that the Japs were the only ones left for them to worry about. But Carwood knew that Ron had the points, even if he didn't. He couldn't stand the thought of losing this. When he told his best friend that, Ron wordlessly handed him papers already filled out in the Captain's name to stay on with Easy until the war was really over and Carwood, too, could come home. So when he heard Easy talking about his impending transfer, Carwood knew that he had to find Ron before the rumours did.  
  
He discovered the man using a boot knife to methodically destroy the edge of a purloined desk. He shut the door firmly behind himself and swallowed all those useless, emotional things that they didn't need to say to each other.  
  
"Winters surprised me with it."  
  
Carwood couldn't stop himself from settling close, his body brushing against Ron's. He could feel the trembling of tense shoulders and he surprised himself by being mad at Winters for doing this to them when it was all so close to being over. He grabbed a hold of that uniform before Ron could pull away completely.  
  
"Ron, stop. I'm not gone." Even if it felt like they were falling apart. "We—I'll write you and you better write back. If you get yourself killed, I'll kill you myself." And he meant it. He wasn't about to let this man do any of the reckless things that he was known for. But when Ron finally looked at him, Carwood was struck by the desolation on that familiar face. It reminded him of the one day of the war that no one in Easy was eager to remember.  
  
Carwood watched, helpless with Ron's tears on his hands, as the other man left. He knew that if things continued on like this, there would be no pieces to glue back together after the fact. Losing Marie hadn't made him feel as strongly as the idea of Ron Speirs being on his own in this war. It scared Carwood more than the possibility of losing the man to an early departure from Europe and never getting a letter back. Fingers trailing absently over the gouges in the wood, Carwood knew that he would risk their secret for this; Dick was a fair man and this war needed all the able bodies it could get, even if it was over in all but name.  
  
The sunshine outside was as bright as it had been at Toccoa but he barely noticed between one CO's office and another's. Major Winters was alone but by this point Carwood wasn't sure he would have noticed if Nixon and Harry had been there; he couldn't stop feeling Ron's lips against his palm like a goodbye.  
  
His salute was rote and his voice was hoarse as he looked straight over Dick's head, and said, "I'm not leaving, sir."  
  
"Lieutenant Lipton?"  
  
"The transfer, sir. I don't want it."  
  
There was a moment of silence as Dick cleared his throat and blinked.  
  
"Carwood, why? It's a great chance to get away from the fighting and-"  
  
Brown eyes met blue as Carwood held his ground.  
  
"What do you think Ron will do to the men without me?"  
  
They could both remember hard drills and angry orders when Carwood had been down with pneumonia after Foye; they both knew that it only got worse when Carwood was hurt and it would be hell if the softer side of Easy was missing completely. Carwood stayed stock still until pale, freckled hands found and tore up his transfer papers.  
  
"Thank you, sir."  
  
"I hope you know what you're doing, Lip."  
  
Sitting in Ron's office, alone with the wounded desk and wondering where to look for his wayward captain, Carwood wasn't worried that he had done the right thing. He was only concerned that Ron would be grumpy over how much he'd shown with his upset.  
  
"I had to," he told the man paused in the doorway, like holding still meant that time would too. "You can't be trusted with your own well-being."  
  
There were a half dozen stories that came to mind where Ron hadn't taken the care of himself that Carwood happened to think he should. He knew about Ron getting shot in the ass, and about the nearly invisible re-sewn scar in that uniform from an enemy prisoner who should never have gotten hold of a weapon and made the mistake of thinking that blood would make Captain Ron Speirs panic. Carwood let himself be pulled into an embrace and held on tightly, thinking of all the ways that it's possible to lose a man. He couldn't help laughing when he got a kiss as Ron was pulling away.  
  
"Consider your claim staked," he reassured his best friend, as if there could be anyone else who made him, little Carwood Lipton, eldest son from Huntington, West Virginia, feel like this.  
  
Those quiet moments spent with Ron and not his Captain, carried Carwood through the next weeks of Easy divide along point lines. Without the action of the war to keep them hopping, Easy slipped a little and Carwood found himself struggling to keep up. He was trying to balance his own fears of what would happen when the war was over with the nagging feeling that it would never really be over, that none of them would see American soil until Uncle Sam had rung them completely dry and dead.


	7. PART II: In which the son is a man and that man comes home from war

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PART II: In which the son is a man and that man comes home from war  
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Fresh from the structured violence of the war, little Carwood Lipton fumbled more than he'd thought he would. He had grown used to captains and majors barking over his shoulder and then sharing that blame on down the line. On American soil, the first lieutenant became the man again. That first month, they pretended that happiness over being stateside could cover the cracks running through them. Carwood watched Ron rise from restless sleep every morning and climb the roof in fatigues. He didn't tell the other man that sometimes a hammer's blow could sound like a gunshot to the unaware.  
  
It wasn't easy being back. Carwood was surprised by how difficult it was to shed the skin of a soldier. His own gun-calloused hands mixing cookie batter was something he had yet to grow used to. He awoke, sometimes, with a yell for Malarkey or Toye still on his lips and his hands reaching for a rifle that wasn't there anymore. Those were the mornings that he was always most grateful for Ron's tendency towards quiet.  
  
Carwood tried to distract himself from the phantom shapes fighting krauts on the front lawn, because as soon as he looked up, they would be gone. He wrote letters to his Ma and his Easy. He penned the odd one to Ron that got stuffed into a shoebox beneath his old duffle in the hallway closet. He knew that eventually Ron would find them but sometimes there were things that Carwood couldn't seem to get out, even at 0300 hours when it was quiet. He could tell Ron about his father's death, about Marie, and about the blood he sometimes still found beneath his fingernails. But those things he felt about who they were together or how he was going to kill Ron if he found another whetstone at the bottom of the washing machine were things that he might still say some day, so he would keep hiding the letters until he didn't need to write them anymore. Because it was easier to tell his best friend in writing about how scared he was that someday little Carwood Lipton might lose Ron C. Speirs and be alone; that people might find out and they would lose everything; that Ron would never get the roof fixed and, come next spring, they would drown in their bed.  
  
Those letters got Carwood through the first few months back from Europe, through settling into living with another person who wasn't just another soldier and hadn't raised him. There was getting used to putting the cap back on the toothpaste when he found it in the middle of the afternoon, because Ron never remembered to, and making enough for two cups of coffee first thing. It was making dinner and bringing the mail in with letters for two names; it was tripping over a sawhorse in the middle of the living room because the roof of Ron's woodshop needed patching due to ice damage over the winter, but this project just couldn't wait. It was a cold nose in the back of his neck that wasn't a dog's, and it was waking another person with his nightmares. It was days when he needed his space so desperately that he was ready to shove Speirs out a window, until he got that shy smile that made him suddenly, impossibly sure that he could taste peaches.  
  
Settling in had to have been a learning curve for Ron too, Carwood was sure. One week he was tripping over dirty shirts on the bathroom floor and swearing under his breath, and the next there was a laundry hamper outside the door. Carwood learned quickly that a quiet word was almost as effective as a mention in an unsent letter at getting his lover's attention. He didn't know if those letters were a healthy way for them to communicate, once they were discovered, but too often words aloud had been orders that he just couldn't trust and if Ron could read his chicken-scratches, then he was more than happy to leave it as it was. The odd note that he found stuck inside his coffee mug just made him smile. Only Speirs would think "I'll pick up the apples" was equal to adoration first thing in the morning. And maybe Carwood would be the only one to really understand how sweet that was.  
  
Carwood could tell when Ron found the shoebox filled with unsent letters. There was a jerkiness to formerly smooth movements whenever he entered the room and the bulb in the woodshop needed replacing because Ron had been out there too much. When he couldn't stand the shadows hiding wings anymore and he missed those kisses, Carwood cornered his best friend. The only thing he was unsure of was whether it was the words of adoration that Carwood couldn't help including, or the words of censure about toothpaste and socks and empty bottles of ketchup, that were bothering the other man more.  
  
"Ron. Ron, stop moving."  
  
Those muscles were trembling beneath Carwood's hands and he waited until there was a deep breath before he leant forward to brush his mouth against Ron's.  
  
"I knew you would find them," he said and Ron uncoiled a little. Some of the tension was worry over a slight because of the snooping, Carwood realized. He shook his head and rested his chest against the strong body caught in his hands. "I meant it, Ron. All those stupid, romantic things, and the rants about your dirty socks. I really hate finding socks balled up in the sheets."  
  
That familiar mouth quirked up into a grin and Carwood felt something that had been tense in his shoulders begin to relax. He rolled his eyes and shoved Ron away a step to turn back to the chili he was making. Carwood knew he would be finding more socks in stranger places for the next few days, but if that famous Speirs survival instinct was still going strong, they would be clean ones.  
  
  
  
The house that they lived in now, that was their home with memories etched into the floorboards and walls, had been the third house that they'd looked at as a prospective buyer and a war buddy looking to rent. They'd only been back in the US for a week and already Carwood was tired. He was tired of travelling with his life on his back, and he was tired of pretending that Ron's name shouldn't be on the deed for the house. They'd agreed to put "Carwood Lipton" on everything that needed signing. He knew the need of it but it pained him to tell the world that Ron Speirs was no more important than any other permanent house guest. Even beyond what they had become to each other, the Captain had saved his life a time or two and Carwood didn't like the idea that he couldn't tell everyone that.  
  
The real estate agent told him all about the history of the house, expounding on its character like Carwood hadn't already seen and fallen in love with the bones. The man seemed to be ignoring Ron in the background for the moment, poking through doorways and cupboards. Carwood took a moment to stand at the beautiful bay window in the living room and watch Ron's shadow stretch across the dusty hardwood like they'd been made for this place.  
  
He couldn't stop a smile when Ron came down from upstairs and nodded to him on the way outside. Following, Carwood discovered the type of backyard that he'd had before the year he turned ten and everything in Huntington changed; the privacy and peace of it sold him on that house more than the bedrooms that needed painting and the roof the agent told him might leak when it rained. He caught those thoughtful hazel eyes, lit by the sun coming over what-could-be-their-own forest and saw the softness he always did right before Ron gave in.  
  
They moved in after a few weeks of double beds that they didn't dare push together at the one motel in town. Carwood was twitchy for some genuine privacy and that first night was spent eating sandwiches from the deli and lying in a nest of blankets on the hardwood. They hadn't bought any bedroom furniture yet and, although Carwood's mother had offered to ship it, neither of them could stand the thought of lying where his wife had. Besides, they'd slept on harder ground in Europe and with Ron in a fitful sleep beside him, Carwood couldn't ever remember being so warm. But even safe with a roof over his head and no enemy artillery in sight, Carwood awoke with every creak of the house around them and felt Ron tense beside him at the same cracks of imagination. He finally fell asleep just as the sky was listening through the curtains left behind, by listening to the muffled sounds of Ron cursing in the kitchen.  
  
When he awoke again, groggy and unsure where he was in Europe, Carwood stumbled through the house in search of his best friend. He was grateful to see a mug with fresh coffee grounds sitting next to the kettle.  
  
Ron was on the back porch, an empty mug on the step beside him and fingers twitching like he should be cleaning the guns they'd given back. Carwood took a sip of coffee and kissed the other man.  
  
"You bought coffee," he offered at that bemused look.  
  
Little Carwood Lipton knew that not every morning would be like that one but, sitting beside his best friend with the bravery and the freedom to lean into the warmth of the man, sipping coffee that a no-doubt caffeine-deprived Ron had gone out that morning to buy, he wished that the every morning would be comparable. It was as close as he ever needed to get to perfection to be content.


	8. Chapter 8

Carwood's hands didn't shake like Ron's did. His body didn't tremble and his vision didn't fade out like he'd heard in letters from Easy, the way it happened for other men when something sparked a memory of the war. There were landmines buried in all soldiers, waiting to explode and shatter them, until the moment was over and they could breathe again. Both he and Ron reacted badly to blood and injury, although it was more noticeable in Ron because it was little Carwood Lipton who had steadier hands. Neither he nor Ron liked fireworks or the dead of winter, which they both tried to avoid with too-warm coats and gloves discarded as soon as they were threadbare enough to let in a wisp of cold.  
  
But through all of those things, Ron reacted more strongly and often it took more than a "Sparky" or a cautious touch to get him back. Carwood just got short of breath. He hadn't thought that it was worth mentioning until Ron grabbed him with a trembling hand and announced that his lips were blue.  
  
The doctor in town that he went to see about a sudden shortness of breath from time to time didn't have much that would help but did give Carwood a business card on the way out of the office. The name on the card had a few extra letters after the MD and it took Carwood entirely too long to work out what that meant. He'd heard of other old soldiers seeing shrinks and knew that tired men like Buck had been helped but he just didn't see that need in himself. He didn't want to see it. When Carwood did make the connection, he hid the card beneath his socks in the drawer and ignored it because he didn't know what Ron would think.  
  
But Carwood Lipton knew that he couldn't walk the tightrope indefinitely, waiting to fall. Something would eventually break and after he nearly passed out because Ron accidentally dropped a jar of beets like blood across their white kitchen floor, Carwood breathlessly handed the card over to his partner. Ron nodded like he'd already found it hidden and went to get the phone; Carwood leant against the counter and wondered why he'd left it this long.  
  
Ron drove him to that first appointment with the psychiatrist without a word but Carwood didn't have to worry what his best friend thought of him, because there was a strong hand warm on his nervous knee, below the dashboard of the truck.  
  
Sitting in the waiting room reminded him a little of waiting in a foxhole for the shells to fall but Dr. Rosen didn't seem as surprised. Things were a little easier after that first visit. Rosen didn't ask him many things that he couldn't answer and seemed content to leave Ron in his own category of classification. It was easier to talk about his nightmares with someone who didn't have their own, Carwood discovered. He wished that he could admit what Ron really meant to him but he had to settle for talking in vague terms about the ways that two lives overlap.  
  
More often, Carwood found himself talking about foxholes and parachutes and bloody angels in the snow. He told Rosen about midnight patrols around a house that was nothing like Europe, but felt like Germany in the dark. They talked about the blood on his hands and how it was good to keep up with Dick Winters and Lewis Nixon, George Luz and Harry Welsh, because those men had been his brothers through some of the worst moments of his life.  
  
It surprised Carwood when they talked about his life before the war, about folding bed linen and helping his Ma out of her chair, and what it was like to get divorced without being there to have a say. It helped soothe some hurt he hadn't realized that he still carried to admit aloud that sometimes he dreamed and woke up thinking that he was still married. Sometimes he wondered where Marie was and if she was doing all right. The war had touched them both and Carwood couldn't stop himself from hoping that she was okay.  
  
He could tell this doctor anything and, in turn, Rosen listened for an hour at a time, every couple of weeks. It got easier for Carwood to stand in line at the grocer's or collect unstained letters from the mail box, when he could leave bits of his uniform behind like pieces of memory sunk into Rosen's carpet and walls. They were waiting for him when next he came but they were less suffocating for the time spent away.  
  
When they finally discussed what brought little Carwood Lipton to that office, Rosen didn't tell him that he was weak or crazy, although they both agreed that the tightness in his chest was all in his head. He had never heard it called anything other than "shellshock" but that had never felt right when he dreamed of bullets as often as shells. If Rosen had been alive and still practicing 50 years later, he would be calling it "Posttraumatic Stress Disorder" and although Carwood had never been sure that "traumatic stress" was strong enough to describe his nightmares of blood and bodies, he had something to call those violent memories when they snuck up on him. Carwood felt a little more confident about life immediately post-war with a sheet of doctor-scrawled instructions for some breathing exercises to do when next it felt like the battle was all over him all over again. He didn't exactly hide the paper but didn't offer it to Ron and they didn't talk about it, like they didn't have to sometimes. It wasn't until they finally did that Carwood realized Ron had no idea what the paper was for or what Rosen really did for him.  
  
Carwood saw Dr. Rosen weekly at first until the permanent feeling of  _stress_  left his shoulders and he stropped jumping at Ron's shadow. When things got easier, he could see that Ron was slipping. Carwood wanted to yell at the man for waiting so long to grab at help offered and to say "I told you so" after Ron's first appointment, but little Carwood loved all of Ronald C. Speirs, including the misguided parts, so he didn't. He just smiled in the face of Ron's anxious breathing in the dark and turned to face that body in their bed.  
  
Earlier at dinner Ron had given him a scare by slicing through already scarred and calloused fingers with a carving knife. He'd been rougher than he had before when wrapping a bandage around blood-stained skin but he couldn't help his frustration; Rosen was supposed to make things better, not like this.  
  
"Sorry," was the whisper against his neck as those arms curled around his waist. Carwood sighed and closed his eyes. Sometimes Ron could only admit the truth when it was against his skin.  
  
"I know, I know," he returned, knowing that he would forgive this man anything, even blood and bad dreams. It just didn't matter when he could have this man in his life, asking stupid questions at 0300 hours because neither of them could sleep and sanding every piece of fashioned wood smoother than it needed to be because apparently Carwood hadn't just survived a war.  
  
"Mostly I just talk," he said, answering the question neither of them would repeat come morning, because the middle of the night was for their questions and their secrets.  
  
He could feel Ron nodding hesitantly on the pillow beside his. The early morning between them was thick with what Ron didn't know how to say.  
  
"Ron, you can't."  
  
He knew the other man wanted to be everything for him; he too sometimes felt like Rosen was intruding on the few moments of peace they had stolen for themselves but there were things that Carwood could tell a stranger that he couldn't tell his best friend.  
  
"But I do love you for wanting to."  
  
The taste of Ron's smile was worth hours in that waiting room, wondering if this would be the session where Rosen finally figured out what another man truly meant to him. This peace, slow and warm like familiarity and family all at once, was worth that fear when Carwood thought about it in daylight. Being with Ron was worth everything and he had a feeling that if they could just hang on to these moments snatched back from sleep, then they would be okay.  
  
  
  
After a year of waking to darkness and nothing that should have woken him because everything was so  _silent_  at the end of their laneway, Carwood came home from a rare solo trip to the grocer's to find Ron sitting at the kitchen table with the haunted eyes Carwood was used to seeing at 0300 hours in Europe. His chest tightened and he reached out like it was only ever safe to do here, in this house of cards they'd built. He didn't dare voice the fear in his throat but there were only two things he could think of to put that look back on his best friend's face and both involved going back to war.  
  
"Ron..."  
  
Dull hazel eyes focused slowly on his face and Ron blinked at him, coming alive beneath his outstretched hand.  
  
"No one knows," were the first words from that familiar mouth and Carwood sagged into the chair across the table. He felt shaky and sick and if they hadn't been discovered for loving each other then he could only imagine that they'd been recalled to active duty because someone had invaded somewhere else. He wished he knew how to refuse Uncle Sam now that he had finally stopped dreaming in olive drab and blood.  
  
"I... I got a letter from Dick..."  
  
A crinkled square of torn,  _damp_  paper was thrust into his hands and that was when Carwood realised that there were tears on Ron's face. He brushed one away without thinking and was stupidly grateful that the other man didn't flinch from him. He read the letter from their old major with a hand still touching Ron's stubbled skin, because he couldn't seem to pull away and Ron wasn't moving. The letter was from Dick Winters and Carwood didn't know how the man had found out about an un-military death of an army Captain's father, but he was grateful that the obituary had already been written.  
  
"Sparky, I..."  
  
He didn't know how to comfort a man about finally burying a parent, one who had been lost years ago upon telling a teenager still waiting for his wings, to never come back home. Carwood searched his best friend's face for clues but found only the 5 o'clock shadow and the lines he learned in Europe.  
  
"I'm sorry," he murmured, pulling Ron against him; he didn't get any resistance and didn't expect any. Ron folded against him like he always did and Carwood hummed some lullaby of his mother's beneath his breath as he carded his fingers through dark curls that he was never jealous of because he could touch them whenever he wanted to. Eventually the man in his arm uncoiled and he couldn't stop a grunt at the sudden weight against him. He pushed Ron back in time to see a weak grin, and rolled his eyes.  
  
"Better?"  
  
Carwood winced at the wet sniff but knew it was nothing like the colds he was prone to now. He got a little-boy nod and squeezed a strong shoulder on his way to the bedroom to change from work. He wasn't terribly surprised when Ron followed him in, and climbed willingly into the bed when his wrist was tugged. It wasn't 0300 hours but with the lights off and the blankets pulled up over their heads, Ron told him about getting sent to military school in the first place and how he had never expected to like it as much as he did. Carwood smiled at the thought of a young, skinny little Speirs and laughed at the indignant look that got him. He shivered and let himself be deflected when Ron bit at his hip until he stopped. It distracted them both from the tears still thick in his best friend's voice.  
  
That night when the clock hand ticked over to 2:56 a.m.—and sometimes he still missed the simplicity of 24-hours of time—Carwood told Ron what it was like to grow up without even a nominal father to mention. He couldn't remember the days immediately following the accident very well, because they were a blur of relatives and hospital-white walls but talking about it reminded him that he needed to call his mother because her birthday was coming up.  
  
When he asked Ron about the lady in the apron who made those favourite shortbread cookies, Carwood got silence. He squeezed tense fingers in the dark and rested his head against Ron's on the pillow. He had hoped that time and Europe had dulled the pain of letters gone unsent but he could see that it hadn't.  
  
It was a round-about way by which he re-discovered that Ron hadn't received a single letter in years. He'd found that knowledge in the war originally but, like most things that he'd come across on the battlefield, Carwood had made it a point to set those memories aside here on safe, tender soil. So the knowledge managed to surprise him again.  
  
It had taken eighteen months and a thousand miles but Carwood finally heard the story about a little boy who spent his childhood waiting for his wings to grow and take him away from a father who never tried to understand and a mother who did everything she could not to cross her husband. That it had taken a plane's wings to carry little Ronald Speirs away was obvious but Carwood couldn't help but wonder if maybe now, years later and miles apart from what had driven them all to different continents, a letter sent might not go unanswered.  
  
There were shades of Ron's past in the surprise whenever Carwood read the portions of letters from Dick or Webster that asked after Ron, but he didn't really understand until the first care package he received from his Ma once they were settled stateside and Ron had shied away from it like it was something he shouldn't touch. Carwood still wrote that woman daily letters in his head and weekly ones on paper; Ron followed him obediently to the post office like he always did and Carwood hoped that the people in line at the baker's or the grocer's they passed thought that their gait in unison was a function of marching and the war.  
  
Listening to Ron's uneasy dreams, knowing that Dick's letter and the included obit were crumpled and still damp from surprised emotion on the kitchen table downstairs, he made a mental note to step-up his letter-writing campaign. Even if all Ron's mother sent him was the recipe for her cookies, Carwood was determined that Ron would recover something from a childhood left behind.  
  
He had written the first letter without much hope and sent the second knowing that he would have to hide any response from Ron. It wasn't easy hiding things, the man had a sixth sense where Carwood was concerned and Carwood's poker face was horrible even when he was trying. But he was determined not to reintroduce this woman into Ron's life until he was convinced that she was strong enough to look his lover in the face and accept him. She was of no use if she couldn't handle the things they had both done in war.  
  
He wrote letters when he came home from work early and found Ron elbow-deep in "do-not-disturb" and sawdust. So far he had narrowed down his missives to two Marjorie Speirs and was hoping that one of them had known a little boy with sad, dark eyes who hadn't known how to fly.  
  
Carwood made sure to get the mail himself, the weeks following his letters going out, under the guise of working off the baking that Ron was always bringing home from lonely housewives and hopeful ladies. Carwood was sure an embarrassed and still surprisingly shy Ron did little to welcome the attention but that seemed to have no effect on the number of plumbing or general household problems of their neighbours and their neighbours' neighbours. It gave him more time to read letters back, for all that it did make Carwood wish that he could lay his own claim on this man they all desired. It bothered him, sometimes, this jealousy, but then Ron would give him that soft, besotted smile that only he ever got to see and Carwood would know that none of those women had a chance.  
  
Still, for all the distraction of baked goods and women's agendas, the letter Carwood had been waiting for was very nearly the one that he missed seeing. He was absurdly grateful when the stack of mail was tossed onto the table without having been riffled through, as Ron set groceries on the counter. He had heard back from this Mrs. Speirs, widow, once before and all that had remained was seeing if she would write to her son. Carwood smiled to see "Ronnie" on the envelope and didn't say a word when Ron's hands were shaking too much to open the envelope at first. He took the recipe card with his own name on it without comment and stayed close as his lover read the first letter he'd received from someone other than the war department or Easy in years.  
  
  
The recipe wasn't difficult. If he could dig a foxhole in under thirty minutes and field-strip his rifle in five, Carwood didn't see why a simple shortbread recipe should be giving him so much trouble. Looking down at the mess in the bowl, he sighed and flicked on the radio, propping the recipe card back up beside the sink, next to the short note from Ron's mother.  
  
Little Carwood Lipton had been impressed by the courage of the Speirs name once again. Seeing Ron's name on the envelope in semi-familiar handwriting—if only because her Cs were the same as Ron's when he wrote "Carwood"—had been a shock and he hadn't known it was a good one until the envelope was open and Ron was handing him a short note penned for himself and a copy of a familial shortbread recipe. It had been in the maternal Speirs-nee-Farquar family for generations and Carwood was a little surprised at how readily she shared it with him. He wasn't surprised when research into Scottish surnames—in the form of asking their butcher, MacLaughin—told him that "Farquhar" stood for an honest man, from the Scottish for "fear," "man," and "honest," because that was just the type of soul within his best friend.  
  
He didn't know how much Marjorie knew about her own son, if there was the intuitive knowledge that his own mother seemed to hold close about who Ron was to Carwood and who they were together, but this stranger had so readily accepted his place in Ron's life and Carwood couldn't bring himself to question that. It soothed something that he hadn't realized was bruised to not have her question his right to contact her on behalf of a stubborn, hurting son. Carwood had only done what he knew he had to, because he could see the pain in Ron's body when the other man didn't realize he was watching; he could see the ache for good memories from home and he would have done anything to help the child behind those medals and scars to see that sometimes a cookie is a quieter way of talking about affection.  
  
Ron came home when he was just taking the last tray out of the oven. Carwood had turned at the patter of those familiar footsteps and was gratified when one look at the hideous apron he'd found stashed in the back of the oven drawer had sent Ron into the kind of laughter that wasn't heard often enough in their house. He grinned and twirled to show it off, slipping a cookie between slack lips when the laughter stopped. He didn't wait to hear the consensus, tossing the dirty apron onto the counter and grabbing a cookie for himself.  
  
Ron stole a kiss as he was passing to put the apron into the laundry hamper and Carwood leant into the embrace. It tasted like shortbread and he pulled away to murmur, "Hmm, needs more sugar." Ron just laughed and kissed him again until they couldn't taste the cookies anymore.


	9. Chapter 9

They were at the grocer's, being stupidly domestic and Carwood was working hard at hiding a smile over Ron's confused acceptance of it when he spotted the group of thugs coming in the front door and felt Ron tense beside him. It wasn't the first time that little Carwood Lipton had been called a fag but it was the first time that he had ever seen Ron react to it. The intervening seconds were a bright burst of violence and bruised knuckles that gave them both bad dreams of blood, bullets, and secrets. Ron's anger was metallic like fear in Carwood's mouth but that body was strong and he couldn't help the minute thrill that he got from seeing Ronald C. Speirs in motion.  
  
The event was smoothed over, the grocer easy, and Carwood apologetic. He was just grateful when the whispers failed to materialize into shouts and slurs. He and Ron talked about necessary violence over crumpled bread that night but it didn't escape Carwood's notice that Ron completely failed to apologize. They hadn't started the violence but Uncle Sam had given them the training to defend themselves.  
  
But he didn't tell Ron when, later, he ran into the same idiots outside of the hardware store. They hurled invectives and little Carwood Lipton did his best to ignore the anger that crackled behind his eyes. He didn't say anything to the man that he spent his life with but it was only a few days later that Ron was watching him straighten his tie and check his thinning hair for alfalfa sprouts in the hallway mirror. They both pretended not to notice that Ron's hands were shaking as the front door pulled closed behind Carwood.  
  
  
When Ron had first brought it up, Carwood had been so opposed that it had felt like his very body was protesting. He couldn't even look at Speirs for the rest of the afternoon. He felt those eyes, frowning and fearful like he could ever leave them, but he couldn't bring himself to say anything but _no_. He didn't trust himself not to spill everything if he opened his mouth and even then, a million miles away from that first peach kiss, he wasn't quite ready to explain to Ron that he knew what they'd say about two men in one house with one bed, because they'd already said it.  
  
Carwood wanted to be shocked and hurt that Ron would ever think that he could ask some woman in the post office or the bakery to dinner, when his best friend was at home alone. Carwood was more disturbed by the idea of Ron doing the same in order to smooth over the rumours that were condensing around them like storm clouds.  
  
Carwood had never told his Ma, exactly, but there were Ron-shaped holes in every story that he did tell in his letters and their semi-frequent phone calls. Some days it felt as if loving Ron was seeping out of his pores and with a glance everyone would immediately see the things they did together.  
  
In basic in Georgia, it was a faint thing that he could ignore if he was careful not to look where he shouldn't, but now he had Ron Speirs by his side and in his house and that knowledge, that visceral awareness of _Ron_ was something he couldn't seem to hide. Carwood couldn't imagine that his Ma didn't know, that the entire world couldn't read it in the lines of his body, yearning for this other man.  
  
Sometimes, when it was dark but he still couldn't sleep, little Carwood Lipton wondered if Ron's mama knew what was between them. From the few, hoarse stories he'd heard about growing up with the bones for wings but not the feathers, Carwood sometimes wondered if Ron's father hadn't known what was different about his son, and if that could explain the man's horrid behaviour. He wondered where he might have been if not here in the dark, listening to Ron breathe.  
  
And even though Carwood wanted to pretend that Ron was lying about the need to hide who they were, to keep this house of cards, he knew that the future and the secret of what they had and had never quite managed to talk about, was not something that Ron would ever joke about. For all that other people seemed to have difficulty understanding Ron Speirs, Carwood knew that in this, the same couldn't be said about Ron. Carwood could see the shadows of forgotten wings that had made Ron feel alone his entire life and he couldn't pretend that he hadn't seen that loneliness. They were both afraid of what could come but Carwood couldn't ignore that Ron was right that it would quiet the gossip.  
  
  
Her name was Shelly and her hair was waves of red over freckled shoulders. Her perfume smelled like roses, her laughter was soft, and all he could think about was the way Ron's eyes crinkled on a deep smile. He held her hand on the way back to the car and wondered if the light in the woodshop would be on when he got home, if Ron would have whittled away the time alone making something for someone else. It was such a contrast to the violence he'd seen at those hands that Carwood couldn't help but want to keep each wrought piece of wood for himself. He didn't want anyone else to touch something so intimately _Ron_.  
  
He got home smelling of her and the house was dark. His hands shook a little at the lock and he didn't switch on the living room light when he found Ron a silent shadow, swallowed by the stillness but shaking ever so slightly. Carwood didn't say anything when Ron gripped him too tightly because he felt the same way, some days, when some woman in town had batted her eyelashes at the strong brunet in his life and all he could think of was how much easier it would be if either of them had been that way inclined.  
  
They could have had houses down the lane from each other, weekly poker games while their wives gossiped about them and men in general, and it would be like it was before little Carwood Lipton had ever given in to this shameful thing inside of himself and kissed his best friend. It could have been friendship and nothing more and it would have been easier without having to lie and sneak and pretend that it didn't kill him to have half a closet that he couldn't bear to hang things in because that was Ron's side of the world. It could have been easier because Carwood wouldn't have known any better.  
  
He didn't say a word when Ron dropped the mustard the day after his date with Shelly, or Maryanne, or Cynthia, as they were making lunch. He just cut sandwiches for them both and ignored the way the bread tasted like European dirt in his mouth.  
  
Some days it was difficult to find things that were worth hiding and hurting Ron by dating women that neither of them wanted. When they had the chance, he almost thought it was worth their Sunday afternoons but sometimes those perfect moments existed in isolation and it was all he could do not to yell at Ron for dirty boots in the middle of the kitchen floor and the backed-up laundry room sink that was supposed to have been fixed last week. Sometimes he would be sitting alone in the dark waiting for a date to end and he would wish for an instant that he was somewhere else. He would wonder what Marie was doing in that heartbeat and if maybe it wouldn't hurt so much if he were there instead.  
  
But then Ron would come in, covered in mud, sticks in his hair and, later, with a boy on his back and another trailing behind. The grin would be blinding, the kiss sweet even as the kids groaned. And it wouldn't matter so much about the hard parts—although he'll still yell at Ron for leaving dripping socks hanging on the radiator next week when the man will get caught in the rain.  
  
  
But they couldn't love each other where the world could see or they stood to lose everything. The only thing they could do was give themselves one day a year to pretend that no one would care if they loved each other. It was a stupid risk but it had been easy to see that each denial had worn down something in Ron. For a year, little Carwood Lipton had watched his best friend fade a little more with each "war buddy" and each woman that Carwood touched without then touching Ron. It wore at him too, but it was more difficult to watch it in this man who had given up everything for him. But, for all the growing ache, it had still been difficult to fight Ron's paranoia. He tried making it a gift from one of them to the other or as a way to strengthen what they had together. In the end, all he'd had to do was ask.  
  
It had been 0300 hours and there was a thunderstorm overhead. They'd just gotten a letter from Nixon about his impending marriage to the woman who had helped him get sober; it had been to both of them but only Carwood's name had been on the envelope and in the dark of 0300 hours together, Carwood could admit that he was hurting. He knew, logically, that it would only cause trouble to put Ron's name anywhere but in secret in a letter to Carwood, but it still felt like their relationship was being ignored by yet another person in the world.  
  
"Please?"  
  
He'd asked and not having to mention what he was asking told him how much Ron wanted to agree with him, even if the man didn't like the danger. Ron gave him a long look that was more like a physical touch in the dark than it normally was.  
  
"It could end badly."  
  
Carwood nodded because he knew the words the world would say in their whispers and he was familiar with Ron's desire to protect him, even when it was useless and sometimes especially then.  
  
"I know."  
  
"Might end everything."  
  
He shook his head and hung on to the capitulation that he'd already received.  
  
"We survived a war, Ron. We can handle one date and a few idiots."  
  
"Idiots with weapons," was all the reply he got, but it was murmured against his skin. Those whispers, Carwood had learned, he wasn't supposed to hear, even when it was "I love you"s that were soaking into his body. He might know the sentiment physically, understand Ron's adoration on a cellular level but he was never supposed to bring it up, never supposed to mention one whispered thing. He held his peace because he liked the feel of whisker-rimmed lips grazing across his ribs as the words sunk in for his bones to carry.  
  
Because it had been 0300 hours when he had asked, Ron had agreed with a minimum of fussing. The fussing came later, when Carwood's fingers were sweat-slipping on his tie because he was nervous even if there was no reason to be. Carwood was in front of the bedroom mirror trying to get the one tie he never wore into the office—because it was silk and Ron had given it to him—to lie flat at his collar; Ron was in the living room listening to the news on the radio wireless and panicking quietly.  
  
That fear was easy to see when Carwood came into the room with the soft gold-coloured tie that he loved making Ron wear because it made the hazel in those dark eyes stand out. He signed under his breath and waited for Ron to look up before putting his hand on a strong, warm shoulder.  
  
"Will you wear this one?"  
  
He knew better than to remark on the shadows in the gaze that looked up at him; little Carwood Lipton had learned to read this man better than his own face in the mirror, some days. Those days were few and sometimes he would still be surprised by a turn of that steel-sharp mind but it was worth the effort to see Ron's warmth when he got right some quirk of expression that no one else had.  
  
The other man rose smoothly to his feet and hid trembling hands in pants pockets. He submitted to Carwood's touch and, to his credit, didn't flinch when the knot pulled tight. Carwood kissed him softly in thanks, his own hands now confident as they smoothed already crisp linen-lines.  
  
"You look handsome," he whispered in the car, nerves of his own making his hands sweat again. Ron glanced at him sideways and he got a dismissive headshake like he had known he would. He just put a hand on a thigh warm in the summer night and didn't try again. There were some things that Ron heard best against the warm curve of his own skin; they didn't need to be said aloud.


	10. Chapter 10

Carwood never actually thought that Ron would agree to go to Easy's five-year reunion. He'd hoped but he was still trying to decide between going alone and missing his other half, and not going and wishing that he had. He wanted to see the men because a few letters belatedly answered wasn't anything like seeing them everyday and sleeping fitfully in cots crammed side-by-side, taking turns elbowing Liebgott for snoring loud enough to wake the generals. It had been different after his promotion but by then there was Ron and sometimes he found himself so preoccupied with getting into the man's head that Carwood had been surprised to remember that there was still a war going on.  
  
He packed a bag for his best friend optimistically but not expecting that ambushing the man with their accepted RSVP would work. He couldn't stop grinning while Ron was re-packing and muttering about mother hens and dress uniforms that still fit even though it felt like you should have grown out of them.  
  
That his partner had agreed was something that Carwood was still wrapping his head around. They hadn't flown because being in a plane without jumping out of it was something neither of them had grown used to; the two-day drive had given them a chance to soak up each other's presence. Carwood wasn't sure that Ron had said more than 50 words the whole trip but there was a contentment in his own bones that made it easy not to begrudge Ron his silence. A palm on a knee where no one could see as they crossed state lines said everything that Carwood really needed it to. The smile in return was a monologue in response and stolen kisses behind locked motel doors were somehow sweeter than a whole morning hidden away at home.  
  
There was something wicked about the risk but freeing about the distance from their own roots. No one knew them along the side-road through this midwest town and Carwood gave himself over to the chance to watch Ron filling up the gas tank and the way that body moved through the sunlight as they crossed into the hotel that now housed Easy.  
  
Easy was as Carwood had remembered it, this great olive green thing made of broken men pretending not to be scared and boys playing at being soldiers. Five years on, the shrapnel wounds had been softened by time away from Europe but he could still see the war in Toye's crutches and in Webster's words about drifting for so long before finding a place to dig in. It wasn't as easy to dig a foxhole when you weren't expecting to die.  
  
They all spoke of having trouble connecting with the world outside the war, outside their heads. Carwood knew what that was like but he still didn't tell them about Dr. Rosen and the sessions he went to weekly at first when the nightmares got to be too much and he couldn't breathe. He couldn't tell them that he had given Ron a black eye, just because he'd woken suddenly and hadn't yet been used to having someone there beside him. Ron had shrugged it off like he always did any injury that didn't involve Carwood's blood, but Carwood had been surprised by how much the bruised flesh disturbed him. Knowing that he had been the one to draw colour to the surface had driven him to Dr. Rosen's office, with the oak panels Ron liked and the receptionist who always smiled at Carwood and handed him a handkerchief when he needed it, before anyone else could notice.  
  
But he couldn't seem to tell Easy any of that without telling them all of it. He settled for writing a mental note to include that admission into his next letter to Liebgott who sent his regards to the company but hadn't come himself, and to Martin; because it could be edited and rewritten if he confessed too much. Instead, Carwood nodded, made sympathetic noises that felt fake even if they were real and escaped to find Ron on the balcony with Dick Winters and the lights across the river. Carwood took pity on Ron the first night and dragged him to their room, booked late because it was the only reason they would have to share.  
  
The reunion wasn't what he had thought it would be and he knew that, like Ron, it made him miss his uniform and his helmet. It felt strange to see these men in hard-won slacks that were any colour but olive. Still, little Carwood Lipton was grateful for the chance to see these brothers outside of the ravages of patriotic duty. He was glad to see Toye and Guarnere mobile again, that Buck could smile when no one was shelling overhead. It made him feel less guilty for peace found with Ron Speirs.  
  
  
  
It wasn't as if he had woken up one morning and wanted to raise children like puppies. Carwood wasn't entirely certain where or when the idea had come to him but he had grown used to looking after people in Easy and a part of him was fascinated by the idea of seeing those protective, paternal instincts from Ron again.  
  
He had always thought it would be nice to have a big family but he and Marie had never tried and since he had found Ron, it didn't seem possible. Carwood knew it was stupid to think that they could make it work but he wanted to. He wanted to wake up in the middle of the night when some innocent nightmare about a monster that wasn't real drove elbows into unsuspecting stomachs and bodies, because childhood stealth couldn't match Europe's sleep-lightly-or-get-killed training. Carwood wanted the white Christmas that he'd seen in the movies, with little footprints in the snow across the back yard. He wanted to get a call at work to bring home a pre-ordered birthday cake because neither of them could handle that complicated a recipe. Somehow, Carwood found himself wanting their Sunday afternoons to be punctuated by young laughter and little voices demanding things that were, for once, easy to give because he wanted to. Carwood wanted that. Desperately.  
  
But he knew that convincing Ron would be the hard part. When he thought about fostering—since adoption would never work—he knew that convincing Ron would be more difficult than a lifetime of paperwork. And there would be paperwork.  
  
Carwood wasn't overly proud of the way that he sprung the idea on his best friend, between passing the milk at breakfast and flipping to the business section in the newspaper. He called it a "Home for Troubled Boys" and knew Ron had heard him when the other man went absolutely still. Neither of them said anything else until it was "goodbye" and "see you tonight" on the way out the door.  
  
Carwood didn't want to mention it again when the idea of it spooked Ron so badly but he couldn't keep himself from watching and wishing that there was someone other than a man he couldn't tell anyone that he loved, to come home to. Getting Beau was an unexpected balm to the ache and Carwood was grateful to Ron for thinking of it. They both came to love that dog and would feel the same for those that would follow; Carwood could tell because Ron never got around to retrieving the shirt that the little mutt had claimed as a nest. It was the way that Ron never really seemed to mind a cold nose waking up him up as the sun rose to go for a walk, or how table scraps found their way into the old, chipped bowl by the door, even when Carwood hadn't done it.  
  
It never failed to make little Carwood Lipton, eldest son of Huntington, smile upon finding puppy and master asleep on the back porch when he stepped out to call them in for dinner. They blinked sleepily but he could always see the adoration in both gazes as they settled on him. When the red tape pulled apart and there was a battle-scarred, bruised boy in a den made into a boy's room by Ron's hands, the warmth in Beau and Ron shifted, but never it left him completely. Carwood understood that devotion the first time Alex sought him out; when looking out the back window showed him why puppies love tireless little boys who know where to find the best sticks to fetch.  
  
Carwood knew that Ron was a good father when he watched the other man set aside the mystery novel he'd been reading all week with three pages left, to go outside and sit in the tree fort with Alex while snow dotted their woollen caps. Both he and Ron tended to avoid the cold for the memories like snowflakes that they brought. For Ron to willingly redden his cheeks without a protest told Carwood all that he needed about paternal devotion; Carwood gave those cold hands a squeeze when two soggy men came in from outside, proud of his captain.  
  
Carwood knew that Ron was truly a parent the first time the other man used shaking hands to smooth away blood that was much too young and much too red. It was something that usually Ron gave to Carwood whenever a bump or a scrape happened to a young body because, of the two of them, Carwood better dealt with those memories. His hands were steadier and his dreams less likely to involve watching his best friend die.  
  
But when Alex came home with a split lip, Carwood watched Ron wipe the blood away with the whorls of a fingertip and barely a flinch. He was ready to step in with a warm hand and a steady touch if Ron gave him that overwhelmed, bewildered look that he had sometimes. But Ron never looked at him so helplessly and Carwood was content to stay on the sidelines, sure that the sweetness on his tongue was peaches. When he told the man that he was proud of him, Ron gave him one of those wordlessly grateful looks that made him wonder who had so misunderstood a little Ronald Speirs that now the man didn't even expect much from himself.  
  
Carwood didn't understand how more people couldn't read the tilt of Ron's shoulders and the warmth in those eyes. He used to love watching Easy spook whenever Crazy Captain Speirs was nearby, but he'd never really understood the fear they felt. He knew that Ron was capable of violence— _that_ he had seen before he had ever gotten within a yard of the man—but it was the malicious intent that he never saw the truth in. Little Carwood Lipton, who saw the good in everyone, had seen the good in Ronald C. Speirs and he couldn't disbelieve that. Not even Ron's own skittish insecurities were going to change his mind. Carwood had worked hard to prove to this man that he loved all the parts of Ron that he could reach, but if he ever met the man's father, Carwood fully intended to put his hand-to-hand combat training to good use. That wasn't the kind of father that Ron was.  
  
Daily, with Joseph, Nicholas, and little Nathan after Alex had come and grown, Carwood could see more warmth in his lover than could possibly have been in the childhood of such an affection-shy man as Ron Speirs. He'd spent many evenings watching Ron and Joe walk in from the woodshop for dinner, without a hairsbreadth between their shoulders, in step and smiling at some joke that hadn't been voiced and couldn't be explained. Carwood had found too many cookie crumbs from late night raids on the jar that was kept in the cupboard above the fridge because only he or Ron could reach, to believe that Ron was anything like the man who hadn't really raised him.  
  
Attempts to explain this to an unsure Ron, shaken by the need to teach their children to defend themselves, in the middle of the night between their nightmares and those of their sons, always failed. Eventually he stopped trying to explain it with words and settled for murmurs and whispers against the curve of Ron's shoulder when neither of them could quite find sleep. Carwood understood why Ron was so distressed by each bruise accidentally pressed into young, eager-to-learn flesh but Carwood was almost equally distressed by the marks like tiny fists etched into his best friend's body. He just wished that Ron didn't feel it necessary. He wished that the boys didn't take to it so easily when the violence wasn't from an unavoidable, unloving figure like Alex had known before them. He wished that he couldn't agree with the necessity.  
  
Carwood made sure that afternoons spent bruising consciences and egos were followed by evenings around the radio and, later, watching the first television set on the lane, with its rabbit ears and intermittent snow when it was raining outside. He didn't see why Zorro was so much more exciting when you could see his horse rather than just imagining the adventure, but Carwood always grabbed a handful of popped corn when Ron wandered by with a bowl for the boys. He didn't mind when the melted butter and salt made marks in the margin of his book, because Ron had already read this mystery and he knew better than to read and eat with library books.  
  
Although it was easy for Carwood to pinpoint the moment when he realized that Ron was a good father, it was infinitely more difficult to find it in himself. If he had asked his mother, he imagined he would hear something about having always been a parent because he had stepped up in the family after his father died. He thought Ron might stare at him and murmur, "Easy," like that explained everything even when Carwood couldn't see it.  
  
But he couldn't see any of it in himself. Not until it was a rainy afternoon and he was sitting on the couch with the radio playing softly and an ill Alex curled up on his lap, because physical comfort was allowed when feeling sick. His thigh was numb and he wanted nothing more than to stretch and use the bathroom but he wasn't about to move when Alex had finally fallen asleep after a night spent tossing in fever. Looking down at that sweat-tousled hair, Carwood knew that he was a father because there wasn't anything he wouldn't have done, any physical discomfort that couldn't be ignored if it was for the good of his boy. Ron just smiled, shook his head, and kissed him when Carwood shared that epiphany, as if Ron had been waiting to hear it.  
  
  
  
It was different sleeping with children in the house, by virtue of new bodies and foreign habits to learn. Carwood had known it would be, but he was still surprised to learn _how_ different it was. Each creak of familiar hardwood became simultaneously a new threat and a friendly soldier in the dark. They were all brothers of their nightmares when 0300 hours rolled around and Ron woke him yet again with a flail and a muffled moan. When a cupboard was shut quietly to anyone who hadn't lived through D-Day and the Bois Jacques, Carwood's feet remembered worn patterns of stealth. He had startled more than one of their sons stealing a midnight snack or dodging a 0100 hour curfew. He knew that if he had asked Ron, there would have been even more stories of Alex with one foot out a second story window and Nathan with peanut butter cookie crumbs incriminating him.  
  
When each boy had been new to them, Carwood knew that both he and Ron had been more forgiving of young bodies skipping sleep. He was sure that there had been a few nights that had seen Ron, dog, and boy watching the sun rise to avoid the things that no one needed to say out loud. But when curfews were ignored and bedtimes avoided after those first few weeks, Carwood almost found himself enjoying the moment; it was nice, he found, to confront a boy about something so innocuous.  
  
That there was usually a dog—Wally after Beau, named by Carwood because Ron was not allowed to name their dogs after seriously suggesting "Europe" and "Sobel" in the same breath—wagging and watching the criminal activity made Carwood hide his smile and wonder what Ron would say about Wonder-Watchdogs-in-training. It seemed like they always managed to pick hyper-vigilant duds from neighbourhood litters. Carwood would have been more concerned if his criteria for choosing them was more stringent than the pup that made Ron smile widest and didn't try to chew anybody's fingers off. That they were all whip smart and watched the boys almost closer than Ron did was an added bonus that Carwood wasn't going to take for granted.  
  
It was nice to come home, dusty and tired from work, to at least one male in the house who could be openly affectionate in public. It got him through complaints about drool and socks chewed by dogs in the closet. And on the rare night when it was Ron out dancing with some woman new to town who didn't believe the whispers about them, it was nice to have someone else waiting with him who missed the man as much as Carwood did.


	11. Chapter 11

The tightness in his chest wasn't anything new. It was a sensation that he had become familiar with in the lifetime that had passed since they'd left Foy behind. Carwood got sick a couple of times a year, colds that gave him shivers and made him croak when he was trying to tell Ron that he was "fine, damnit, now go to work and quit hovering." The doctor he was dragged to their first year back stateside said that he'd done himself permanent damage sleeping in the woods and playing at being a soldier. Little Carwood Lipton didn't have the heart to tell the doctor that the war had left more scars than weakened lungs—the way Ron shook at the sight of blood and the way neither of them could really relax until July 5th was proof of that.  
  
Carwood didn't like the way Ron got when he was sick, like everything would shake loose from the house of cards that they'd built; like he was fragile; like in waking nightmares, he was already dead. When Ron thought he was sleeping, often there were strong, trembling fingers in his hair, whispers against his temple. Ron was always a warm, comforting presence even though Carwood knew how hard it was to sit in the waiting room with no right to demand access to your best friend's side.  
  
Carwood had experienced that awful wait three years ago when Ron fell off a roof that he had been helping their neighbour re-shingle. Carwood had sat in the waiting room for two hours with Nathan curled up asleep on his lap. He hadn't heard anything until Ron was released on crutches with a horrid white bandage around his head and a story that wasn't very funny about how Doc Roe would have given this doctor a run for his money in terms of chattiness. Ron didn't tell him until later that the nurse had invited him for drinks once his cast was off; Carwood had tried to laugh at that, ignoring that it happened when he'd been in the waiting room, useless and unreachable while Ron was most likely scared and definitely in pain. When Carwood awoke from nightmares of watching them take a covered gurney past without a word, Ron was already awake and shifting restlessly beside him. After were painkillers given in the face of Ron's hoarse protests that they were unnecessary, Carwood had moved as close as he'd dared to that familiar body and unfamiliar plaster and tried to close his eyes without seeing limbs at an awkward angle and legs gone completely.  
  
"You're not allowed to do that again," he whispered, because 0300 hours was always the best time to give Ron instructions and pretend that they would be followed. The admonishment had never worked before but that didn't stop him from saying it when a table saw nearly took off a finger or when Nick came home from school with his arm in a sling and a letter from the principal about stunts off the jungle gym.  
  
Which wasn't to say that Ron never had the opportunity to return the favour, sitting by Carwood's bedside as he struggled to breathe and begging him not to do this again because war-scarred nerves just couldn't take it and there was no way that Ron could raise their boys alone. Carwood got better, after about a week in an oxygen tent and strict orders to stay away from anyone with a cold in the future, and was safely tucked away before he noticed the tremble in those hands.  
  
"Ron..."  
  
His voice was like wood rough before Ron sanded it smooth and his head hurt for want of sleep but little Carwood Lipton couldn't resist when this man was looking more terrified than a paratrooper ever should.  
  
"I'm okay," he whispered, wrapping quivering fingers in his own. Ron followed his weak tug and if that head on his chest was just a little too heavy for tired lungs to lift comfortably, Carwood wasn't ever going to mention it, not when both of them stank too strongly of hospital and fear.  
  
  
They passed years like that, with one or two scares each year to turn Carwood's remaining hair grey and send a silent, scared Ron into his woodshop to sand smooth wood not otherwise touched. Carwood came to associate the smell of sawdust with feeling better, like a swath cutting through the scent of hospitals and the squeak of gurney wheels.  
  
In winter, Carwood tried to spend his last few days of recovery at home in the living room, to give Ron the bedroom as a retreat when waking nightmares grabbed hold too tightly for the man to easily shake off. But if it was warm enough when he was getting better, Carwood curled up beneath their willow tree in the back yard for the few days before he had to go back to work. He liked it best when Ron was with him, a line of warmth and a windbreak, another set of eyes so he could relax the weight of his vigil and sleep with the leaves making sun flicker over any exposed skin. When that skin was flecked and freckled by old age, Ron slathered Carwood in layers of sunscreen and Carwood let him, leaning into each touch and laughing when Ron nearly purred at returned attention.  
  
When Ron was busy or away at a job site, Carwood always seemed to gain younger shadows during his convalescence. He had a feeling they'd been set upon babysitting duties when he saw Ron look the other way on a number of infractions, but they never seemed to begrudge the inactivity when outside with Papa Lip. Alex had always brought homework out to the willow's shade and sometimes Carwood could convince Joe to read aloud from whatever adventure story he was reading that week. Nicholas would talk about anything and everything, telling wild stories just to make Carwood smile, without ever requiring input from the recovering man. Nathan would often run circles with whichever pup would follow him, before collapsing in a heap at Carwood's feet until Ron came out to wake them for dinner.  
  
How the boys reacted to him being sick changed as the years passed. It seemed like the stronger their sons got, the harder his yearly colds hit Carwood. The rattling cough started to last for a month, and then two.  
  
As they got older, Nathan went from running in circles to lifting his barbells, and Joe started bringing out pieces of wood that Ron had given him; Carwood liked watching the coarse grain chip away into delicate designs and swirls smooth to the touch. Even when there started to be girls and love for the boys, no one ever seemed to complain about afternoons spent beneath the willow with Carwood. He smiled when Nick's first girlfriend came and sat with them. She was a sweet girl with a pretty smile and strong hands when she helped him to his feet after the dinner bell rang. Carwood wasn't too surprised when, a half dozen break-ups and some girls in between, Joe came home from college on spring break and proposed to Laura, beneath the willow. He watched from the bay window until Nathan told him that the popcorn was getting cold and the movie wouldn't wait forever. Carwood just smiled to himself and shook his head when Ron gave him an inquiring look—he wasn't about to ruin Joe's surprise when sweaty, nervous hands stumbled back inside still clutching at soft, female fingers. Carwood could still vaguely remember the rush of proposing and being accepted; he smiled when Joe told them and was grateful that both Joe and Laura loved each other fully, in that way you should if you're going to spent your lives together.  
  
After Joe's graduation and a wedding that meant moving across the country to be with Laura's family, it was Nate's turn to follow his brothers and leave the nest like a proper little paratrooper. The house was quiet when it was just Carwood and his best friend to fill the spaces. They'd buried their last pup a few years earlier and Ron hadn't fallen for any new runts. Carwood found himself enjoying the chance to have their Sundays full of quiet peace again. He liked the luxury of sleeping with that body naked against his, knowing that there were no young eyes to hide from. He liked that they could spend an entire afternoon beneath the willow without a word between them.  
  
  
  
It scared him at first, the tightness in his chest. It wasn't anything new when it struck him hard every couple of years. But this year it seemed to hit him faster and harder than it had before. Carwood had never considered 81 old before and that scared him. But not for himself—he didn't mind the antiseptic smell and the prodding doctors the way Ron always had, although he refused to let them wheel him out in a wheelchair whenever they released him. He didn't like the way the doctors were looking at him, frowning behind clipboards and stethoscopes. Little Carwood Lipton didn't like the haunted, desperate way Ron looked at him minutes before visiting hours were over, because only spouses were allowed to stay beyond an eight-hour clock. His hand still had bruises from Ron holding on too tightly when no one was looking. Sometimes, when it was late and he couldn't sleep because the sound of his own heart beeping was too loud, Carwood's hands squeezed each other, because he couldn't stand his fingers feeling so cold.  
  
It seemed like he was always getting sick. Every year at least one bad cold would knock him on his ass. It wasn't often that it required a visit to the hospital—there were only so many times that he could listen to doctors clucking their tongues about pneumonia-weakened lungs and the kind of scars that wars leave—but this time felt different. This time the vice was tighter and it never seemed to let up, not even in the steam of a hot shower like it usually did. That he didn't protest and brush it off as Ron was bundling him into the car seemed to scare the other man. He tried to reassure his best friend that he would be fine but, somehow, platitudes gasped between bouts of breathless, painful coughing, failed to calm Ron. Since the boys had left home, grown families of their own to remind Carwood of how old they had become, Ron's hovering had become worse.  
  
"Love you, Sparky," Carwood murmured as Ron was helping him out of the truck in front of the hospital. Each doctor's visit was different in terms of how much time they were able to spend together and Carwood wanted to make sure that message got through. "You hear me, Ron?"  
  
Looking up, he found dark eyes staring at him from a bloodless face.  
  
"You too."  
  
It was a soft whisper but it still made him smile. He tried not to lean too heavily on the other man as they shuffled into the waiting room. He lay his head against a familiar shoulder and told himself that the risk could be forgiven when he was so exhausted he could barely keep his eyes open. Ron told him later that the doctor had taken one look at him in the waiting room and called for a gurney to have him admitted. Carwood squeezed the hand that had snuck next to his as he was laying back on the pillows. He was only going to close his eyes for a minute. Just a minute.  
  
When he opened them again, Ron looked haunted. The calendar was a different date than he remembered and Carwood smiled a little at the hands wrapped around his. He smiled at this man that he loved.  
  
Living with Ron was both the easiest and most difficult thing that Carwood Lipton had ever tried to do. It was easier than living alone or with Marie because love made it so, but it was harder because the world never once stopped trying to peek in their curtains. Even after 56 years, he was still finding unexploded mortars and fields of the most beautiful poppies he'd ever seen inside the man and in his actions. The minefields were the boys Carwood wanted so desperately and the poppies were the way Ron distracted him from disappointment so skillfully that it took Carwood a few days to even realise it. Like he was blown away by Beau and shocked to tears by a headboard worn smooth by familiar hands idle during times of stress. Minefields were blood and scars and the things that they still had trouble talking about, like Marie or Ron's father. But the poppies were watching Ron's wings finally grow and having the man stay with him, regardless of the freedom. They were Sunday afternoons and waking up on Alex's first father's day with them to a scribbled card and a breakfast tray for both Dad and Papa Lip.  
  
Some of Carwood's favourite afternoons were Sundays. It didn't matter when the grass was itchy or damp with rain, or that his body ached with a fever not quite forgotten. On those afternoons, with Ron a drowsy murmur whenever he paused in running his hands through dark curls or broke off his reading aloud, with the kids somewhere else and the world on hold, little Carwood Lipton, prodigal and eldest son of Huntington, West Virginia, found peace. He loved the warmth of Ron's head on his thigh and the way the shadows danced across his book with the wind through the willow's branches. On those afternoons, it didn't matter who whispered what gossip about them or that Ron really should have been working on cabinets long overdue for Mrs. Southam. What was important was that the kids were quiet, the dog was asleep at his feet, and no one would ask anything of him in the next hour that would have required any more movement than turning the page. When the sun hit them just right and Ron murmured his name happily in sleep, Carwood was always so sure that he could taste peaches. If he could have stayed there with Ron into perpetuity, he would have gladly. He liked to think that some Sundays, Ron wished for the same thing, between long blinks and sleepy smiles.  
  
  
 **End.**

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [So Much To Tell (Fanmix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4652046) by [keatsinqueue (crediniaeth)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crediniaeth/pseuds/keatsinqueue)




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